'

.
PRAISE OF THEORY
Speeches and Essays
HANS-GEORG GADAMER
translated by Chris Dawson
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Yale University Press New Haven and London
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Published with assistance from the Louis Stem Memorial Fund.
This book originally was published as Loh der Theorit:
Rtdm und Aufsatu by Hans-Georg Gadamer,
copyright 1983 by Suhrkamp {Frankfurt am Main).
Copyright 1998 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole
or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and ro8
of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission
from the publishers.
Set in Caston type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, I900-
[Lob der Theorie. English)
Praise of theory : speeches and essays / Hans-Georg Gadamer :
translated by Chris Dawson.
p. em. - (Yale studies in hermeneutics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN O-J00-07JIO-O (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Philosophy. 2. Theory (Philosophy) 3 Hermeneutics. 4 Reason.
S Science and the humanities. I. Title. II. Series.
1998
193-dC2I 98-7n5
CIP
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines
for permanence and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of
the Council on Library Resources.
IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
t
'<



'

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CoNTENTS
Foreword I vii
Translator's Introduction I xv
CHAPTER I
Culture and the Word It
CHAPTER :t
Praise of Theory lx6
CHAPTER 3
The Power of Reason 137
CHAPTER 4
The Ideal of Practical Philosophy I so
CHAPTERS
Science and the Public Sphere I 62
CHAPTER 6
Science as an Instrument of Enlightenment l11
CHAPTER 7
The Idea of Tolerance 178:t-I981IS.
CHAPTER 8
Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation I 101
CHAPTER 9
Man and His Hand in Modem Civilization:
Philosophical Aspects / 114
CHAPTERIO
The Expressive Force of Language: On the Function of
Rhetoric in Gaining Knowledge/ 113
CHAPTER II
Good German / 135
Notes/ 143
Glossary/ 167
Bibliography/ 171
Index/ 174




'
. '
FoREWORD
To put it the way ]aspers did, w:._"!!_anted to grasp in what way
reaso1!_ was incarnate in And it is that search which
has determined my entire philosophical work. Right to my very last
years that impulse has held through. . . . We were in search of a
way to think in which we could see the truth of things, to discover
the truth that was there in each thing before us in the world. And
-- -- -
meant that we were utterly distanced from ... efforts to control
things, to make things, to manage things.
Thus Hans-Georg Gadamer recendydescribed his l' e' o'ect
from 1 30 to the resent. Praise of Theory confirms this self-
assessment. Here, st'tdnslated in its entirety, thanks to the
care and commitment of Chris Dawson, the and lectures
of 1970s and early 198os that Gada0er collected in
Praise of Theory represent his ongoing to
reason is incarnate in existence itself an by it is .impossible,
- ---- ---- - -----
for that very reason, to rationalize our
The second, critical aspect of Gadamer's project is more ac-
cessible because more familiar. In Praise of Theory Gadamer
sounds a warning against the dominant superstition of our
time: the unwarranted belief that the life-world can and should
be rationalized, that is, reordered according to a technological
model of applied knowledge. "Technical thinking," he fears,
"is beginning to expand into a universal view of the W<?rld." On
that view, it is not just t_he business that should be ratio-
.-,
'
..
vu

nalized by "efficiency experts"; all worlds are best run
cally, by discovering the laws governing them, th=!!_
these worlds in calculable wE-s that will ultimately benefit us
all. This kind of rationalization appeals not only to bureaucrats
who use "expert opinion" to avoid taking responsibility and ex-
ercising judgment; it appeals to everyone who believes that the
life-world can and should be managed scientifically to the end
of bettering it. In this fantasy, social engineers join forces with
all those obsessed with emancipatory utopias-indeed with all
who believe that homo faber is blessed with infinite possibility.
new needed, Gadamer argues, to over-
come the old Enlightenment superstition that we can make our
world anything we would have it.
What has made this superstition credible is the seemingly
-- - - - .. .. - - -
unbounded power of natural science. Within the physical
- -
world, science has worked miracles, and there seemed every
reason to believe its successes could be replicated in the human
world simply by transferring its method. In Praise .Ef._'!'!!!ory, as
in Truth and Method, Gadamer means b
formal rocedure of in ui b which
an object" so as "to break down he resistance of
to dominate the processes of nature.' Objectification enables
control, and such dominion constitutes t e proof and fruit of
understanding. The are whether human domin-
ion has any limits, whether there
and whether a form
nality exists that therefore cannot be subsumed under method.
For Gadamer,
that show why method cannot be the universal paradigm- of
. . .
. , an that m turn explains why his work in concep-
tualizmg these sciences has made him skeptical as he says of
"ffi , ,
e things, to make things, to manage things."
The!l!_fe_:world )tudied by the human sciences cannot be objec-
. . - ,
I Fortfl.Hird
\
,


tified- and hence it cannot be controlled, made, or managed-
because we belong to it. The belonging to the human
sciences hardly proves that, not being susceptible of method,
these sciences are not rational-indeed not sciences. the
contrary, the human sciences represent a of "reason in-
carnate in existence," a kind of knowledge-Gadamer calls
that comes from participation ratht;!
thana1stanciation. The importance, indeed the daily necessity,
-- ---
of practical knowledge implies that method has no
on truth. It is in fact quite blind to the truths that lie beyond
the horizon of the technological worldview, the truths of the
human sciences.
What then is "the human" that is the sub'ect matter of the
.... .
human sciences? Among the several defining characteristics of
.,
the human to which Gadamer has given his attention over the
in one to which he returns
in Praise of Theory is Perhaps this is not en-
tirely unexpected, given his suspicion of "making." "Is human
socie ossible at ah: hen work s onl the
Gadamer asks. "It s worth considering to what extent what the
. -------- - -
Greeks calle to kalon..,..the beautiful in the broad sense of a free
- -- .. au PI
and superfluity, is that whereby human society satis-
fies itself as human." Elsewhere he speaks of "a whole domain,
beyond animal self-preservation anq beyond nature-the-artist's

inexhaustible play of forms. creations_<?.f
free human being bring a constant hW!l_an life:
play, imitation, rite, ceremony, and all those things that, un-
necessary as they are stimulating, we call the beautiful. This is
obviously a list that could be extended further, and it enumer-
ates the opportunities that follow from the non-specialization
of being human."
_
of but rather
I
that serves no ends, not even human needs. Romanticism lo-
Zated the in the aesthetic, using
beauty as a countervalue in the Age of Mechanics even as
Gadamer uses it in the Age of Technology. But what Gadamer
learns from the Greeks, Plato in particular, is that to kalon can-
not be confined within the limits to which neo-Romanticism
up to the present has circumscribed it. It keeps overflowing
the bounds of the aesthetic, spreading out to embrace all those
things that Diotime calls the whole ocean of the beautiful
(Symposium, zxod). In Truth and Method, Gadamer shows that
the beautiful plays a role in ethics; in Praise of Theory, he shows
that the specially human impulse toward to kalon has a decisive,
even defining, place in science as well.
We have,seen above that Gadamer's critique of
'\/Y"\1\
continues Ufiabated in this book, but one dt erence from t e
earlier work is that here natural science is not conceived merely
as "proto-technology,, as it were. Science,
cannot be reduced to its applications and
defines natural science as science is its theoretical character. Is
- ---
it not the case that "science sometimes involves asking basic
questions from whose answers no results can be expected that
would directly fulfill any purpose? ... In truth, all research
is basic research, and only through a secondary transformation
can it address the problem of applying its findings." Scientific
then, is a signal example of "all the ways we
for technology-; not the raison d'etre'ft{t1.
of sc1ence, however, what 1s? Gadamer answers: "Science exists
and is important for no other reason than because it is beauti-
ful.' (kalon in Greek)
to l!_is_
o_f tru tEJ .. laim to."
1_1}
m truth for its own sake bu:_ also and equally as a spe-
-- ------ --------- --
:tl FornQrt/
'
<
cial case of to kalon. Such a conception of and
strikes strangely on modern ears. We are by
and the sciences alike to accept between the
two cultures, with beauty consigned;o the one and truth to the
other. Yet, however dissonant, is absolutely central
of Theory and to Gadame(s philosophical ambition as
a whole. In Heidegger's terms, that project is the "hermeneu-
tics of facticity"; in Jaspers's terms, it is "to grasp in what way
reason is incarnate in existence itself."
The word incarnate is not employed casually here, as the
allusion to Jaspers shows. On the contrary, Gadamer means
to draw on all the Christian resonances elaborated in the sec-
tion on "Language and Verbum" in Truth and Method. What
distinguishes verbum from logos (reason) is what distinguishes
Christian incarnation from the concept of embodiment charac-
teristic of Greek religionf 1f the Word became flesh and if it is
only in incarnation that spirit is fully realized, then the logos is
freed from its spirituality .... The uniqueness of the redemptive
event introduces the essence of history into Western thought,
[and] brings the phenomenon of language out of its immersion
in the ideality of meaningj Embodiment maintains the dis-
tinction between, say, the real Zeus and his mere appearance in
the form of a swan; in the incarnation, however, the apparent
is real. @e Son does not merely appear as man but becomes
man, the Word becomes flesh; and, most important, incar-
nation does not represent a degeneration or concealment but
rather a full realization. As verbum, logos .. "' t; ... ed in history,
r .......
not diminished. For Gadamer, then, the icl\?erft symbolizes the
way reason is no longer ideal, abstract and transcendent but in-
carnate in historical existence, without at all losing its character
as reason thereby.
Gadamer is not a theologian, however, and when he expli-
cates the notion of incarnate reason, he does so not only in




I

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..
Christian terms-the word becoming flesh. Rather he turns
to Plato-hardly a promising source for anyone whose aim is
"to discover the truth that (is] there in each thing before us
in the world." Yet in Socrates' discus ion of beau Gadamer
discovers precisely what one would not expect to find in the
great metaphysician: a point of tangency between this world
and the other, the intersection between existence and transcen-
dence that corresponds to incarnate reason.[ "Beauty [Socra-
tes says] shone bright amidst these visions, and in this world
below we apprehend i)-through the clearest of our senses, clear
and resplendent. For sight is the keenest mode of perception
vouchsafed us through the body; wisdom, indeed, we cannot
see thereby ... nor yet any other of those beloved objects, save
only beauty; for beauty alone has been ordained, to be most
manifest to sense and most lovely of all."
idea -this, says Gadamer,
cal crux of Platonism," and its locus of beauty.
ideas, "the idea of the beautiful is truly present, whole and un-
---- .. - --- ---- . ... .... - -
divided, in what is beautiful.'' In "this world below," we can be
deceived by what only seems wise, say, or what merely appears
to be good: but even in this world of appearances, all beauty is
. true beauty, because it is in the nature of beauty to appear. That
is what makes the beautiful distinct among ideas, according to
Socrates. It is ekphanestaton, most radiant, most manifest. The
of itself.(fy needs no validation other than
ttself, no s1gns that could err or lie, because it offers itself in
evidence of its own truth. For Gadamer beau tv re resents self-
.
evidence, the most fundamental kind of truth. Beauty exempli0
the in,divisibility of real and. the it represents,
m Jaspers s ter .!!_ mcamate m existence.
Wherea j as Gadamer defines it, is the formal ideal
of abstract rationali the faculty of incarnate reason is some-
thing more like judging of beauty, taste is always
--
Jriil Foreword


I

in existence. It always participates in local, historically
determined norms and yet, even when cognizant of its situat-
edness, taste does not disavow its judgments of the beautiful
but on the contrary, as Immanuel Kant proclaimed, expects
them to be universally accepted. In this way, taste represents
ccan ideal of rationality with determinate content," an alterna-
----
tive to the contentless ideal of method. It is not the only one,
of course. Once we move beyond the aesthetic, taste takes its
place among other forms of phronesis no less grounded in the
of Dasein-ccthe convictions, values and habits that we
all share with the dee est inner clari and the most rofound
-
Ye!, for all this, the good judgments of phrone-
sis do not lose t eir claim to be rational; they are no less logos
for being grounded in ethos. There is no standard of certain!Y
h_!gJler than the self-evidence of what ccwe all share with the
inner
But if taste is best understood as a form of practical or in-
carnate reason in general, what is the case for beauty, once we
proceed outward to the ccwide ocean of the beautiful" -that is,
to being in general? We saw above that it is in the nature of the
-
beautiful to appear mode of being is self- resentation,
in this respect, Gadamer contends, the beautiful is r resenta-
-
tive of being in general, for the nature of being is to appear:
presents itself in language, es ecially the language that
Gadamer here calls not verbum bu Sage, , he language of poetry
legend. Such language is not insofar as a sign in-
volves a signifier representing a signified different from itself.
Here they are indivisible. Like English "saga" and etymologi-
cally related to it, German Sage unites in its meaning
is saic!)and saying of It designates "the word,s special
claim to autonomy, not to be saying something that would then
need to be confirmed or certified [by appeal to its referent], but
rather something that is certain precisely in its being said.,
FortWOrrl I xiii
It is not by chance that legend, poetry, and other nonsemi-
otic forms of language share the self-evidence of ethos._ I.f
sign is whatever can be used to lie, Sage by contrast is a mode of
self-evident truth, where the
wh;t is Like be;;ty, Sage symbolizes the intersection
- --------
of the real and the apparent, where being and seeming are in-
divisible because here being is presenting itself in language.
Praise of Theory, then, represents an extension of themes
elaborated in Truth and Method, but also a significant advance
on them. Wary of attempts to rationalize existence because they
assume that reason must be imported from without, Gadamer
instead looks for the reason incarnate in existence itself and
finds it not just in the human sciences. @ _praises
natural science for its self-suffi.i_e_n.o/, its. of
motive, and he praises poetry and legend for what is very simi-
... ----- - --- -
lar, their self-referential, self-evident In Praise of
Theory Gadamer celebrates the arts and the sciences-the sci-
ences for being a mode of beauty, the arts being a mode
of truth-and he celebrates both together as self-legitimating
modes of existence dependent for their rationality on nothing
above, beyond, or outside themselves.
joel Weinsheimer
Foreword
'

TRANSLATOR,S INTRODUCTION
In the twentieth century, philosophy has been divided between
what has come to be known as the "analytic philosophy" of
the anglophone world and "Continental,. European philosophy.
In some ways the division was a strange one. Both traditions
appeal to the same classics from the history of European phi-
losophy, to Plato and Aristode and to Descartes and Kant.
Both involved reactions to, and vigorous rejections of, the great
metaphysical romantics (Hegel in particular). The traditions
even drew on common sources from the late nineteenth cen-
tury, when both sides of the English Channel were witnessing
neo-Hegelian and neo-Kantian revivals. Discussions of prob-
lems introduced by Gotdob Frege and Franz Brentano have
remained of decisive importance in analytic philosophy. And
yet until the last quarter of the century the division remained
almost absolute.
In recent years, there has been a growing movement toward
reconciliation, or at least toward serious mutual reading and
consideration from both sides. In Britain and the United States,
more and more university courses involve the study of twenti-
eth-century European philosophy, and bookshop shelves have
filled up with the works of Martin Heidegger, Michel Fou-
cault, Jacques Derrida, and Jurgen Habermas. This new study
has not come easily to those trained in the ways of twentieth-
century anglophone philosophy, Analytic philosophy
prides itself on its ability to thoroughly. Every argu-
ment must be watertight, and should preferably be translated
XV


I
I
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t
. 1 . al alculus In order to compel the reader to accept
mto c "' .
the consequences or reject the premises(!Jieones start
small and build on one another, with philosophers working on
small problems in the hope of making toget.her, with-
out any large idealistic scheme to work and .any
real hope of arriving at worthwhile solut1ons. What 1s certamly
out of the question is the kind of sweeping, evocative approach
to problems that Gadamer takes in this book.
In frustration at the narrow vision of analytic philosophy,
some English-speaking thinkers have, in recent years, begun to
look more carefully at the alternatives offered in the European
tradition. Those who have read Ludwig Wittgenstein have
sometimes found that they can occasionally make sense of Hei-
degger. Political theorists have looked again at critical theory
and at neo-Marxism. Some people have even tried to dig a
theory of knowledge out of Foucault's historical archaeologies
of power. And in the end many have taken one look at what
Derrida writes, thrown up their hands in horror, incompre-
and disgust, and decided to stick to analysis after all.
Gadamer is a great deal more comprehensible than Der-
rida or Heidegger, holds more clearly philosophical views than
Foucault, and in my opinion runs into less serious tangles and
paradoxes than Habermas. There are a number of issues on
which his position is not vastly different from that of such ana-
lytic philosophers as Donald Davidson or Charles Taylor, and,
as the basis of his philosophy involves the building of bridges
in the "fusion of horizons," there is much interesting compari-
son work to be done.
. For th: reader, meanwhile, to anybody unschooled
m ph1losophy, Gadamer reads like a great rhetorician,
IS what he really is. rhetoric is the
original element in his philosophy, and he uses rheto-
nc as much as he advocates it. That is not to say that he uses
XfliiTratulalor's lnlroduclion


'
what he calls the "oily'' rhetoric of the modem mass media,
which, it is claimed, can compel us to believe whatever the
journalists tend to presuppose or take for granted. Gadamer's
rhetoric aims not to tackle contemporary issues in contempo-
'--"-/'VV'V\..1).
rary language but to return to our tradition and the heritage of
European thought in order to see how our modern presuppo-
sitions are arbitrary and in order to find possible alternatives
to them.
Because his style is rhetorical, though, we do not find a

wealth of painstaking deductive argument or careful stipUlative
definition in Gadamer's writing. Instead, he tries to convince

by_ showing them plausible
.. of
_ Gadamer, as a rhetorician, is a speaker first and a
writer only when his speeches are transcribed. He has produced
only two books as such, and one of them, Plato's Dialectical
Ethia, was written as a thesis in order to obtain a university
promotion. The other, Truth and Method, is a difficult text,
mostly because Gadamer was so inexperienced at constructing
readable books and failed to make the argument of the whole
work clear at each stage. Its style sounds chatty, however, and
large parts of it are clearly based on lectures and speeches that
Gadamer has given. All of his other work originated as lec-
tures, speeches, monographs, confere11ce papers, or short essays
contributing to journal discussions(Gadamer's need to have a
specific audience to across very clearly, and his
aim, like that of is always to convince his current
audience by appealing to their own ideas, and never to provide
an argument that must force any rational person who accepts
its premises to accept its conclusions.
This rhetorical approach allows Gadamer certain freedoms
themselves without, I think, de-
from the quality of his philosophical thought. He is

Ttans/atori hwii

..
I
not restricted to arguing about narrow or over-specific ques-
tions but can allow his thinking to By into speculation about
those great and ultimate questions that lead most philosophers
to the subject in the first place. Without constructing an un-
stable theory on uncertain foundations, he is able to show how
these large questions are related to one another, and to suggest
what possibilities we have, as humans, for answering them.
In making these suggestions he has an advantage over most
other contemporary commentators and so avoids merely re-
inforcing some modern prejudice about them with his rhetoric.
He is what he would himself call a thoroughly cultivated man,
..
and he is familiar with a vast range of ideas
of recorded historx_: this allows him to survey the historical
changes in the approaches people have made to various prob-
lems and to see how the answers given in each period were
related to the circumstances in which they were made.
Our own period is no exception to this, and a historical ap-
proach can writers in the tradition h.;1ye __ ()
insights that contemporary circumstances conceal from us. The
history of thought is of great importance for Gadamer, then, as
he believes that ,the only way we can avoid the compulsion to
believe the prejudices of modernity is to search history for alter-
natives to them. The one tenet to which he holds constantly in
all of his writings is that we have no external viewpoint from
which to assess the truth of what we all believe, and no
axioms are available that are sufficiently certain to allow the de-
duction from them of any unprejudiced truths.@r him, this
the. logical and deductive approach to philosophy, and
lt h1s rhetorical return to the historical philosophical,
theologtcal and literary tradition.
If we are looking for specific claims supported by watertight
then, we shall find Gadamer irritating and shallow.
B_ut tf we are looking for ways of approaching really deep ques-
1tfliii/ Translator's lnlroduttion
l



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the world and our place in it, or if we are looking for
some kind of orientation in modern society and are frustrated
by the lack of any external viewpoint from which to examine
it, we shall find Gadamer's historical rhetoric thrilling and in-
vigorating. In these transcripts of his speeches, he
us personally, and his style is never dry or uninteresting(]f he
leaves us with more questions than answers, his historical sum-
maries always leave us with the impression that at least he has
left us with better and more relevant questions about our situa-
tion in modern society than we had before we heard him. We
are also given new ways of trying to answer them: not really
new ways of course, but ways that may well be new to us. Who,
after all, would think of tackling the problems of modernity
by listening carefully to what Plato or Augustine said@s is
Gadamer's approach and when he takes it we often feel that he
has opened a window that we closed a long time ago and let the
fresh air back into the problems with which we are struggling.
GADAMER's LIFE
Many readers will find it helpful to know a little about Gadamer
himself. I am not going into depth here, but knowing the out-
lines of his career can shed some light on the content of his
thought. In fact, there is a good deal of interesting work still
to be done on Gadamer's biography. His autobiography, Philo-
sophical Apprenticeships, bears the inscription "De nobis ipsis
silemus" {let us say nothing of ourselves), and Gadamer is re-
markably true to this principle in relating his own life story
through his intellectual encounters with other thinkers. For ex-
ample, he mentions his two marriages and his two daughters
only in passing: we are never told whom he married or when,
or even the names of his daughters. He tells about his life
through sketches of the personalities and the thought of the
various philosophers whom he has known and who have influ-
Trans/a/or's Introdwtion/ %iJt
enced him. And although he does occasionally use anecdotes as
philosophical examples, there are not of these to form
any clear ideas about individual stages of h1s life.
Hans-Georg Gadamer was born in Marburg on February u,
1900
, and grew up in Breslau in Silesia, now Wroclaw, in Po-
land. His father was a chemist. He was never required to fight
in the First World War, as he was too young and Breslau was a
provincial town a long way from the front. He began to study
a wide range of languages, literature, and "human sciences" at
Breslau University in 1918, and the next year he moved to Mar-
burg, where he was influenced by Richard Hamann's art history
and Stefan George's poetry. He turned to philosophy, and sub-
mitted a doctoral dissertation on Plato to Nicolai Hartmann
and Paul Natorp in 19u.
The next year, shortly after he was married, Gadamer spent
a term in Freiburg with Husser! and Heidegger, who made a
deep impression on him. He then returned to Marburg, where
Heidegger also moved to take up a chair. Gadamer apparently
survived the years of economic crisis under the Weimar re-
public without being pressured to become anything other than
a post-doctoral student. During these years, according to his
autobiography, he became deeply insecure about his own intel-
lectual ability, and all through the 1920s he led a "cloistered
life," reading very widely in classical literature and philosophy.
He ventured out only to go to seminars, lectures, and reading
groups, of which there were many both early in the morning
and late at night. It is perhaps not altogether surprising that
his marriage did not last.
In 1928, he submitted his thesis on Plato's dialectical ethics
(now published under that title) that allowed him to "habili-
tate" -to become a junior lecturer. During the rise of National
Socialism he was attempting to become a professor, but was re-
peatedly passed over for jobs because, he says, he continued to
1Ut1Translalor's





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.

I

maintain friendships with Jews. Finally, in 1938, he was given a
chair at Leipzig. He survived the war there by not speaking out
against the Nazis beyond a few cryptic remarks hidden deep
in treatises on Plato. He maintained his friendship with Hei-
degger, who had left Marburg in 1928 and had been an ardent
supporter of Hitler in the early years of his rise, despite the fact
that Heidegger (although probably deeply disillusioned with
the way events turned out) never expressly recanted his Nazism.
Mter the war, when first the Americans and then the Rus-
sians came to Leipzig, Gadamer was made rector of the univer-
sity, as he was one of the few professors who had had no con-
nections with the Nazis. He did this job for five years, but the
attempt to rebuild a free academic life under communism was
no easier than academic life under fascism had been. Finally,
just as he was about to leave to take a post in Frankfurt in 1947,
he was arrested by the Russians and interrogated for three days.
Eventually, however, they admitted to having made a mistake
(or rather, blamed it on the German police) and let him go.
In Frankfurt he began to write again, but produced only lit-
erary history and analyses of Goethe. It was not until he moved
to Heidelberg two years later that he returned to philosophy.
Throughout the 1950s he worked on his magnum opus, which
brought together material he had been using in lectures for
years. Truth and Method was completed in 1959 and published
in 1960. It drew Gadamer into a number of more active philo-
sophical debates, and in the succeeding years he wrote shorter
pieces in its defense, clarifying his position with respect to the
attacks made by Jurgen Habermas and Emilio Betti. He also
continued to work on Plato, and founded a Hegel Society, his
contributions to which led to his book on Hegel's Dialectic.
In the 1970s he began to travel every year to America to teach
one semester at Boston College, and his writings started to in-
clude a greater emphasis on practical philosophy. Most of the
'Ihlnslalor's JUti
essays in this book are the products of this period of Gadamer's
career a time in which his new contact with the English-
speaki,ng philosophical community was giving a renewed im-
petus to his thinking. All of the pieces here were, however,
prepared for and delivered to German audiences rather than
American ones.
At the time of writing this introduction, Gadamer is 95 years
old and is still remarkably active. Although he officially retired
from his chair in the 1970s, he still has rooms in the Philoso-
phisches Seminar at the University of Heidelberg, where he still
gives enthralling public lectures to packed lecture halls without
notes, and still attends conferences diligently, offering clear, in-
cisive and amiable commentary on the papers presented. The
ten projected volumes of his collected writings are now all
available, but Gadamer is still producing new work every time
he gives a lecture.

GADAMER's THoUGHT
It may come as a surprise te those who are acquainted with
Truth and Method that Gadamer could be the author of a book
entitled Praise of Theory. After all, he has become renowned for
his polemic against the dominance of the methodology of the
natural sciences, and
11
theory" is a word that is immediately as-
sociated with that methodology. Truth and Method argues that
the following of "scientific method," which we might suppose
to involve the setting up and testing of theories about the world,
is not a privileged route to truth, and that truth itself is more
an event that arises within certain kinds of conversation than
a property of propositions or theories about the world. Does
Praise of Theory represent a change of heart on Gadamer's part?
The title itself is, of course, ambiguous. The essay from
which the book's title is drawn traces the history of pro/rep-
tic, a name for discourse that exhorts, teaches, and advocates
~ x ITrtmslator's Introdu(tion




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"theory, in the form of an "examined life ... But it is also itself
-as are many of the other essays in this book-protreptical
in nature: it is "in praise of theory, as much as it examines
"the praise of theory." The title already suggests, then, that
Gadamer's aim is both descriptive and normative. He wants to
describe what "theory" and "science, mean to him, and also to
recommend them to us as ideals.
- This seems to be a departure from his earlier work in two {:j 5
ways. Gadamer is now urging us toward science as an ideal, .q.t1
whereas before he seemed extremely wary of science in gen- 'J
eral, seeking to demonstrate the primary roles played by art
and history. It is also interesting to find him with such a posi-
tive recommendation at all. The aim of Truth and Method is
descriptive: the universal and ontological nature of
hermeneutics is brought out in an analysis of play, prejudice,
and understanding, but no consequences are
Reason in the Age of Science raises questions about how we should
respond to the advance of technology, but it is far from recom-
mending that we turn to science. Praise of Theory now leads us
to re-examine the concepts of theory and science, and to see
how a genuine scientific questioning can be maintained within
our modern technological culture.
In fact, this has been a concern of Gadamer's for a very
long time.
1
His understanding of the concept of science, like
so much of his philosophical insight, arises from his extensive
classical scholarship, and especially from his reading of Plato.
His earliest concerns were with ancient philosophy, and his love
of ancient Greece remains the driving force behind this book.
G,adamer isolates the Greeks as the only people in the world
to have a concern with abstract questioning about
in it, and to have separated this concern
and from literature, thus founding both
phy and His interest is therefore always to see how
--- ,
1Nnslator's Introduction/ uiii

our modem concepts started out, what they meant when the
Greeks first questioned them, and how they remain related to
the mythology from which they became separated.
The "theory" that Gadamer praises, then, is not what
modern scientists understand by the word. Gadamer has not
changed his mind about the shallowness of scientific method
in comparison with dialogue and the openness arising from
a reco ition of our finitude. 9n the he counts the
Greek notion of theoria on ide art and dialogue as a source
of trut . ecause he traces its original
to that implied in the slavish following of a method
to achieve a result. The encounter with a true work of art is ....::.....;_;___________ -
supposed to bring us face to face with our selves and so to lift
us momentarily out of our everyday concerns and allow us to
experience an event of truth (this is discussed in The Relevance
of the Beautiful). There is also a certain kind ,of dialogue, as
Gadamer explains in Truth and Method, in which the partners
in the conversation are aware of their own finitude, aware of the
effect that history has on them and on their conversation, and
are therefore able to approach the subject matter they are dis-
cussing playfully, to bring their prejudices into play by putting
them at risk: this allows them to "stand outside themselves"
and to be truly present to the subject matter they are discuss-
ing. In this way, the movement of their conversation moves
them toward what Gadamer calls a "fusion of horizons," and
an event of truth. "Theoria" is the element that is common to
these two events. It is "being-outside-oneself" so as to be truly
present to something else.
How is this related to what we call theory? Clearly,
it has nothing to do with the notion of a theory, a system of
propositions to be tested by experiment and so confirmed or
overturned. It is much more closely linked to our familiar con-
trast between theory and practice; yet Gadamer claims that
;cxifi/Translatori Introdwtion
'


' <


'
the contrast is misleading and that theory is, in fact, itself the
highest form of practice, the "highest manner of being human"
(Truth and Method, 454). In tracing back the ancient Gr ek
etymology, he reaches a point where theoria means jus "wit-
Here the idea is intrinsically linked witl(testive ritual)
participant in such rituals would be a witness,
was there just to see what happened and through
thi.s act of witnessing gave the ritual its validity. It was through
this theoria, or witnessing, that a festive ritual could be what
Gadamer thinks of as an "event of truth." Hence the very act
of was productive, and therefore practical. As we
can see from Gadamer's analysis of festivals in The Relevance
of the BeautifUl, the communal element of ritual whereby each
individual is caught up by the wider context of events of which
she forms a part gives to the act of witnessing its element of
"standing-outside-oneself." Theoria involves validating some-
thing by being caught up in it, bearing witness to it.
_ traces the continuity of this notion with lato's
(idea of the philosophical life. he link is drawn from his rea ng
of-P1it<>'s-ihe.oryofl'orms, and his reflections on the relation-
ship between Plato's idea of the Good and his mysterious doc-
trine of ideal number. A closer look at Gadamer's understand-
ing of Plato will help us to see how he views scientific theory.
Gadamer believes that to read Plato as though all of the
,, q . .
forms were supposed to be transcendent 1s a mistake: When
Plato says that we need to "look away" from the things aroun4
us in order to see reality, Gadamer thinks that all he is really
----------
recommending here is a quest for elegant unity among the con-
- -
fused variety of phenomena we encounter. By and large, he says,
Plato's forms are simply the same kind of univmalia in rebus
about which Aristotle was to speak.
2
But some of the forms
are more transcendent exceptions to this: here Gadamer draws
on his interpretation (which is based on the extant dialogues)
Introduction/ :cttJ
I
' I
I
of the indirect tradition of Plato's thought about
takes Plato to have placed great on the
a Thus
ever we have one thing it can be both divided and combmed,
and either of these processes will give a plurality. Similarly, any
P
lurality, taken together, can be regarded as a unity. Gadamer
II
11
f h r h
thinks that Plato understood certam o t e 1orms-t ose most
closely related to the idea of the Gooi- as having a structure
analogous to this. One of these
0
form/is the be!utiful, which
Gadamer therefore be
each of its any beaunful thmg has a radtant
elegance about it, which, although it needs no further justi-
fication and arises wholly from the very particularity of the
particular beautiful thing, points
look for further elegant unities in other things. In this way, our
-
experience of the beautiful is supposed to turn us toward the
Good. For Gadamer, Plato's idea of the Good is identified with
unity as such. Thus the purpose of protreptic becomes a display
of elegance that turns us to search for unity. Gadamer identifies
- ----- -
of manif!station in what i !..
and good ... This witnessing leads us away from the
confusion of our manifold sense-impressions, and toward dia-
lectical reflection which aims toward establishing unity.
This reading of Plato, then, allows us to see how Gadamer's
of theo can be related to modern science.
both a practical witnessing of somethmg t at presents itself as
self-evident-a witnessing which is all that is needed to con-
firm it as true-and also the first step toward a withdrawal
out of the confusion of our everyday lives into a contemplation
that pursues unity. Gadamer derives his positive idea of science
from this basis. A true scientist is someone
trut 'that ts, someone who looks for elegant unity that under-
lies the confusion of our observations: it is also someone who
VNiiTranslator's Introduction


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withdraws from the multiplicity of common-sense opinions.
This now looks a great deal more like our familiar conception
of a theorist. But Gadamer is critical of the idea that it might
ever be possible to reach the goal of unity for which a theorist
he does not believe that there is any unique truth toward
which theories can approach as they are improved. This is con-
sistent with his reading of Plato's idea of the Good as the only
truly transcendent form: it. is right for us to aim toward unitz!
is always necessarily beyond our grasp, because all unit>:
also multi_elicity .
In Truth and Method, Gadamer shows how his hermeneutic
notion of truth is related to art, history, and language. He be-

gins with art because he believes that it is our encounter with
'f"le..t'a'-:d--s _..u ..... s ...... .... O-J'n"VtY'at/Yis
------- -----.............-- .-..
in genuine theo . Art is analyzed as free play that is
transformed into a structUre through its being understood as
a unity. This not mean that an artwork is a unit>::
quite the reverse. Only in being understood as a _unity by an
on art be trul,r
because it is only in these particular attempts at uni-
fication that a work of art can have a personal meaning and
be applied to the lives of those who understand it. is no
transcendent "true or "author's intention" behind an
it Ts onlr reallr as an artwork from
the points of view of those who find it ..
- - .... - -- - --- ----- - -- - - -
for them that is applicable to their own lives. Similarly there are
-- - . -- - --------- .... - -- --- ------- - - -.. - -- ---
"true facts" about what has happened in the past. Instead,
\history, is seen as the dimension within which we live: Qadarner
emnhasizes that we are finite knowers and that therefore no in-
-- r ... ., .... - - - ------ ----------- - -- --- - - -
He
avoids advocating a thoroughgoing relativism or "historicism,''
the role played by tradition. Tradi-
tion not only transmits accepted historical truths to us but also
TratUiator's
determines our whole outlook on life by means
C!!?? Gadamer sees language r:!?t a
t
ture of signifiers that convey clearly defined meamngs, but
s rue _
as a means of direct personal communication that continually
and evolves as a result of what people try to use it
to do. Hence he thinks that our concepts hold within them
deep truths about reality, and embody the entire evolution of
our tradition. Consequently, conceptual analysis }s his favorite
means of setting out on his quest for unattainable unity, and
he is always trying to look closely at the that our
language carries within it.
Again and again in this book, then, we shall find that Gada-
mer comes to consider some concept, such as tolerance, cui-
- -. - . - - --
ture, or reason, in terms of the history of words and concepts.
This is an important part of his hermeneutic appropriation
of tradition. "Hermeneutics" means just "interpretation," but
it has come to be a name for the lines of thought explored
by Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, ahd other followers of Heidegger.
What it points _ on
He consistently refuses to allow any claims to be able to
find a universally valid viewpoint, or to be approaching (as op-
posed to just aiming toward) a description that could claim
to be complete or uniquely true. He claims that
sis is itself universal, however, on the basis that hermeneutics
itself is a
Gadamer believes not only that
all understanding is tied to the model of one individual trying
to understand another in conversation but also that all being
that can ever be understood is tied to this situation; thus, the
only understanding that it is possible for us to attain is that
which we derive by the same essentially linguistic means that
w_e there. Because of his refusal to allow any external
vtewpomt, then, he continually emphasizes the role played by
""iii/Translator's lnJToduttion



.
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an individual's finite understanding. Even taken together, we
remain tied to our finite viewpoints, and so the only truth we
can attain is hermeneutic in nature.
!}..ut this need not ean that it is impossible for us to break
away from the tradition that determines us, or gain sufficient
distance from it to criticize the culture within which we ve.
Praise of Theory is full of cultural critique, and we must ask
on what basis Gadamer believes that such critique is possible.
After all, Habermas and others have argued that on Gadamer's
account there can be no critique of tradition, because that tra-
to _be the only possible source of our
and prejudices. Gadamer holds that we can never correct all of
- --- __ .. -- ---
. because the limited nature of our understanding
prevents us from bringing all of them into play at once. Haber-
mas and others have argued that this view must inevitably lead
a more or less defeatist acquiescence in the social status quo.
fl ( only other possibility, however, is to introduce some sort
\ of theoretical framework or transcendental ideal that can act as
an external yardstick against which to judge our current beliefs.
Gadamer's worry is that there is no way for us to do this, and
that any "external" measure we attempt to construct (such as
an "ideal speech situation") must inevitably remain inBuenced
by the very prejudices it is designed to measure.
In Praise of Theory Gadamer further emphasizes his idea
thatf.hat really distinguishes man from animals is our ability
to "take from our immediate situation. In Truth
and Method and elsewhere, this ability is usually identified with
enables us to introduce to one another ele-
are not present to our senses, and to discuss them
as though they were in front_ of of Theory it is also
identified with theorist c.an take
distance from her immediate concerns by becoming mvolved m
a quest to learn about something she finds interesting. Theory is
1hmslaJor's lntrodwtion I uiJt
thought of as becoming absorbed in
has no immediate practical relevance to one s life and s1tuat1on.
It is an extension of ust this idea of distance that Gadamer
makes to enao e the ossibllity of cultural criti hat see s
to prevent us from being abe to criticize the tradition, to which
Gadamer has said that we "belong" because it determines our
beliefs and attitudes so completely, is our inability to reassess
the prejudices it has given us from any viewpoint that is ex-
ternal to those prejudices. w_c: .. bring all C?!
our onc!=_ and reassess
we can achieve a sufficient level of open-mindedness to be able
---------------- ------ ..... ----
to re-evaluate a few prejudices at a time. _through
______ __.., _--- --- --
theory. In Truth and Method this process was most often de-
scribed as becoming involved in a "real conversation" in which
the personal concerns of the interlocutors become irrelevant,
and they are joined in questioning together about the truth of
the subject matter they are discussing. Gadamer also said that
it is possible to have this kind of conversation with a text, and
that conversation is more the of
the two interlocutQfs are For this reason, he rec-
------
ommends a return to the older texts of tradition in order to
enter into conversation with them and to see where our preju-
dices differ from theirs, in the hope that we may find some new
insight, follows this procedure regularly in this book by con-
sulting c assical authors about our modern situation, and quot-
ing them as witnesses to the possibility of a different viewpoint.
But we can see that what is important in this procedure is
that it enables us to take up distance from our personal and
practical concerns, and that this at once moves us one step
away from the full force of our prejudices: if we become in-
volved in theory, in disinterested questioning, it is easier for us
to be open-minded and so easier to find new ways of looking
UJti 'Jiranslalori lnlroduclion


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at our own situation. If we merely pursue our interests, we shall
remain with the prejudices they have given us, but if we tum
away from our interests and become involved in "irrelevant,
questioning, our whole outlook can easily be changed, and this
can have positive results with respect to our actual concerns.
Hence we find Gadamer saying that he is not impressed by
a researcher who fulfills his research program and succeeds in
proving what he wanted to prove: he is much more impressed
by somebody who leaves his research plan behind altogether
and follows up a side-track that puzzles him and, as a result,
altogether unexpected and new.,
Hence it is correct to say that Gadamer's position does not
allow for the possibility of systematic cultural critique: and
this is precisely the reason why we find no systematic criticism
either in this book or elsewhere. But he is still able to give us
valuable and chastening insights into the way we live and think
by holding up the way people have thought in the past as a dis-
torting mirror in which we can view ourselves, which will allow
us to see how the mirrors we are used to also present us with
distortions.
"PRAISE OF THEORY,
The essays that appear in this book were written for various
purposes and occasions: as a result, the book contains a cer-
tain amount of repetition. But as Gadamer always speaks from
memory, and develops his topic anew in addressing each new
audience, every time he comes back to a theme we find a
slightly new slant on it. This makes every new essay interest-
ing in its own right, even where it covers ground that Gadamer
has already dealt with elsewhere. In Praise of Theory we find a
collection of essays that go well together and read remarkably
smoothly, and the repeated recurrence of certain themes such
Trans/a/or's Introlfu(fioniJWti
as the Enlightenment treatment of rationality serves to
Gadamer's position on these issues to a greater extent than ts
achieved by any individual essay.
1
, Although most of the essays here are easily accessible and
display Gadamer's assured and lucid rhetorical style, in first
essay, "Culture and the Word," we find Gadamer at his most
obscure and, at times, his most verbose. The essay is important
for those who are interested in the details of Gadamer's posi-
tion, however, because it deals with themes that are not treated
elsewhere@is in this essay that he endeavors to explain how
he sees language as being the unique distinguishing feature of
humankind, and in which he explains how he sees philosophy as
a product of our specific Western tradition that is derived from
classical antiquity. Here he also tries to explain how meaning,
even in individual cases, is dependent not on the semantic con-
ventions attached to individual words and constructions, but
somehow on the whole of language and the entirety of our
ability to communicate with one another. The obscurity of the
passages,in which he attempts to defend this position_ is evi-
dence of the difficulty these questions present. His ideas are
certainly interesting, but his success, in my opinion, is limited.
z, It is in the title essay of this collection that Gadamer explains
in detail how he takes theoretical and practical concerns to be
-.,.. _... - / . , , ' V'..''- , , ' ".A/'/\/V )
mterde In domg so, he treats us to a sweep-
mg summary of the history of philosophy; here he examines
how the tension between involvement in practical and political
affairs and the desire to back away from life in order to consider
it theoretically has expressed itself in each era of Western cul-
ture. (_He concludes that any practical activity that involves no
1
theoretical reflection on the nature and goals of life is stifling !
a.nd useless, but that the proper meaning of utheory" is a prac- .
tical one of being caught up in a communal sharing in ccwhat
is," and that it is this that inspires worthwhile practical activity.
lnlrodu(/ion





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This conclusion forms the backdrop for the social commentary
he makes in the essays that follow.
In "The Power of Reas n," one of the oldest pieces in the
book, Gadamer define as the atte with
He suggests- that to be ational to go beyond
one's own immediate opinions, beliefs: esues, and prejudices
and to try to make sense of what other people say. Only in this
way, he argues, can it be possible for people to overcome their
natural animosity toward one another and to develop art of
compromise: there needs to be some communal element, some
- force. to pull us together. The importance of diver-
sity and open-mindedness is a theme throughout Gadamees
writings, and this impassioned attack on dogmatism is as clear
and brief a statement of his beliefs on the subject as he has
offered.
The theme of is further developed in "The Ideal
P 1 osop Gadamer argues that the basis
of our rationality is a communal practical involvement with one
------- ----- --"----------- -
another and the world, and that our common commitment to
--- rr ,._
to theorize it.
He for this reason, the humanities should .try
1f: ) t I 1.!!: 't_t ' 'fi ali f h d
to emu ate tne sctentt c rattan ty o mat emattcs an natu-
ral science,8should instead try to testify to and share in this
background of shared practical rationality, relying on rhetoric
as much as on deductive reasoning. Here we also find the fur-
ther suggestion {as so often with Gadamer, frustratingly left
as no more than a suggestion) that !_he natu-
ral _migh! their
.in livin Hs..._ this
theme again in his essay o
c.!: Then, in "Science and the Public Sphere," Gadamer begins
to apply these ideas about rationality, theory, and practice to
contemporary social issues. He argues that the desire to
-
1wmslator i I I uxiii
?

rize and to research
our practical :hat
bl between the two. This giVes nse to the prob-
mevJ a e . _ _
lem and a compromise between two sides
of our nature, which is expressed in the problem of the social
role of academia and the funding of abstract research.
/:, . In "Science as an Instrument of Enlightenment," we find
Gadamer's first decisive criticisms of modern society, and his
first recommendations about how matters might be improved.
As in Truth and Method, h.!! _the. <!.f
too dominant, allowing us to be-
... . - .. . ----
.aims to dominate nature
.. -- .. - -- .. .. -
thinking through what it is doing and why. He calls for
t; go. a" fn we lose the
prejudices not of myth or of religion but the "technological
dream., and the "emancipatory utopia" (this latter phrase refers
to Habermas and critical theory in general)@is leads him to
deal with the contemporary problems of environmental ethics,
and he ends with a plea that we must alter our consciousness so
as to think of ourselves as "stewards of the earth."
7 The centerpiece of the book is Gadamer's historical exami-
nation of the concept of tolerance. Here the central ethical
themes of the book are introduced as Gadamer discusses the
of "rationalization., that
argues that the
was secure in the. of the king and the religious moral-
ity of the people (so that it could to be tolerant of...di -
ing religious beliefs), has been replaced by a faceless(''system"
_t_ at
no li_e
to lose all the solidarities that once held us
are
. . --
tamtleS any more but only a disorientating relativism, and from
lntroduclion
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this Gadamer concludes that one universal ethical requirement
must emerge after all- the requirement of tolerance.
4
11 In the following essay, Gadamer takes a more analytic ap-
proach, and comes as close as he ever does to defining some
of his central ethical terms-"Isolation as a Symptom of Self-
Alienation." Here we find explanations of what Gadamer means
by such as "rational obligation," "administration," and
"freedom.'{rhis is also where he explains in most detail exactly
how communality and solidarity are to be established within
modern capitalist society, and how they can help us to break
out of the isolation into which it has cast us and to re-establish
r ...... \
our connection with "the universal.'\J:iis answer contains a sur-
prising echo of Marxism, following as it does Hegel's analysis
of the relationship between the consciousness of the master
and that of the slave. Gadamer's contention is that we can find
solidarity only by finding our own self-fulfillment in our work:
-- -
what he does not make clear, however, is exactly how it is pos-
,
sible to achieve the specialized functions into which
he has claimed modem society divides us.
/- In his essay on the significance of the human hand, Gadamer
draws some of these ideas together, examining again the pos-
sibility of finding between two conflicting sides
of human nature.\!:!e' argues is the fact that our senses
and our intellect are not naturally specialized that
us from the animals, and that we must not allow our scientific
culture to drive us into an unwanted artificial specialization in
our social functions. This artificial specialization, he contends,
weakens our power of individual judgment by forcing us to fit
in with a pattern that is meaningless to us ... suggested solu:-
tion to this problem comes in his his
Bildung as the of a of
ing rru: oneself be able to see alt_ernative points
of At of the essay, we find the clearest implica-
Introduttionl .n1


G d ves that he believes it to be possible for some
' t1on a arner g1
: individuals to acquire the right kind of cultivation even if our
society tends to prevent it, and that they can lead the
I toward establishing a communal power of judgment
tommu-;;;'i) that can succeed in making the political consulta-
the people a more meaningful process, and in allowing
governments to acquire a genuine sense of political judgment.
"The Expressive Force of Language" deals further with this
1 k G d ' . . al
sensus communis, relating 1t hac to a amer s pnnc1p con-
cern in Truth and Method-the relationship between language
and understanding. In this essay Gadamer defends his use of
rhetorical rather than logical arguments on the grounds that
it is in rhetoric, not logic, that community and solidarity are
forged, and that all logical and scientific reason must rely on a
rhetorical background in everyday life, at least if it is to have
any social consequences. He discusses how over the ast three
centuries we have moved away from the\ideal of the cultivate
scholar ho has a very broad knowledge of aca 1c 1ssues, an
further inquiry, and the ability to press himself
to laiPeople in clear and elegant terms. Gadamer
has been replaced is a spe-
Cialist m a narrow field. Tliis restriction is said to hinder his
to outsiders and consequently to
his of this
m turn makes the frequent appeals made to his expertise by the
media and the judiciary less and less appropriate. -
/I, This contrast between litera and scientific styles of writ-
in d "-,...' _Nv'\.f'v'vV\
eveloped further m the concluding essay. ereas some
of the comments in "Good German" are certainly specific to
German, there are a good many that are equally applicable to
any language. It is a charming essay, and it is fun to note how
Gadamer'
5
own wntmg seems to be more carefully styled than
lnlroduclion





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usual when he discusses style. It is also an appropriate place to
end the discussion of the relation between theory and practice:
that is
ability to use the rules and conventions of
--- ----
to __ ?!\!_
to sar.: Once again, the emphasis is on finding balances,
here on those between imitating and diverging and between
conceptual and poetic thought .
Gadamer reaches few conclusions in this book, and even
his recommendations concerning the ways in which contempo-
rary society can be improved often remain unclear. He is con-
tinually seeking useful approaches to our social problems, but
thinks that if he were ever to believe himself to have found the
answers, this would in itself constitute evidence that he had
merely given up the search. Hence not one of these essays ends
with a specific conclusion. Far more often, they end with a quo-
tation-usually a quotation about the need to go on searching,
.
or about the limitations of our individual powers and the im-
portance of cultivating our communal judgment. As we have
seen, this apparent vagueness is what Gadamer's ideas about
understanding and social critique would lead us to expect. But
the impression we might ge; from a first reading, that it is
the result of shallow or woolly thinking, is certainly wrong.
We must not be deceived by Gadamer's chatty style, which
{as the concluding quotation suggests) conceals a wealth of
subtle thinking and artistry. Gadamer deals with real and seri-
ous problems, and goes only as far with them as he is sure he
is justified in we wish to produce any arguments that
claim to be more than the suggestions Gadamer offers, we must
show how they can hold any valid claim over anyone other than
the individuals or groups that happen to agree with the prem-
ises and logic they use. Alternatively, we can follow Gadamer

Translalttr's /nlrOJwlion/
!,
in drawing on the tradition that underlies the differences be-
tween so many of us, and in using rhetoric to build a communal
solidarity in which we can find balances and compromises that
will allow us to make better sense of ourselves and the world
we share.




i

I
Culture and the Word
The concept of culture is suspended in a peculiar indetermi-
nacy. If I were a philosophical poet of Plato's stature, it would
not be hard for me to compose a dialogue in which Socrates
asked each of us what he really means by culture. And right up
to the end of that dialogue, every one of us would be stuck for
an answer: although we would all know that culture is some-
thing that supports us, none of us would be so knowledgeable
as to say what culture is. This points to a deep-seated problem,
as we know from the almost indisseverable connection between
culture and the critique of culture, between pride in culture
and pessimism about culture. Thus, the positively second-hand
German word Kultur occurs for the first time in an interesting
way, in the form of an independent concept, as an Enlighten-
ment concept of value: that one could be lifted up above the
rawness of the state of nature and progress along this path to
become a perfect "policy maker," toward complete humanity-
this was the arrogant confidence of modernity at its beginnings.
The Enlightenment's pride in reason has been contested
since Rousseau wrote his famous discourse of 1750, which won
a prize at the Academy of Dijon. It dealt with the assigned
question: What moral advancements does mankind owe to the
unfolding of the sciences and the arts? ("Si le retablissement
des sciences et des arts a contribue a epurer les ma:urs"). This
question stemmed from the spirit of the Enlightenment, and
A lecture given at the opening of the Salzburg Hochschulwochen,
1980,
l
in answer to it, Rousseau praised the innocence and simple
purity of nature.
1
Kant admitted "Rousseau has set me right,"
2
and grounded the principle of morality on the autonomy of
moral reason, which is the same for everybody. Herder followed
Rousseau's critique of corrupting customs at least so far as to
contrast true culture to civilization.
3
That distinction proved
decisive for the German-speaking world and beyond for a long
time. The apolitical, aesthetic tone in the word, which can be
heard in the phrase "art and culture" and in our concept of "cul-
turallife," arose from this separation of the technical ordering
of life (civilized and therefore superficial) from profound cul-
ture. Schopenhauer's work became its philosophical expression
in modernity, in the nineteenth century in particular. Accord-
.
ing to Schopenhauer, redemption from the dreadfulness of the
blind Will that governs the whole of nature and the human
world lies in disinterested viewing, and so in art in particular.
With the rise of bourgeois society, that is with the ascent of
the bourgeoisie to equality with the court and nobility, an al-
most religious cult of art arose. This movement provided the
cultural furniture of so-called urban cultural life, whose the-
aters, museums, concert halls, and lecture halls reveal the en-
,
thusiasm for culture of the bourgeois centuries. Then, in the
twentieth century, a counter-movement occurred that criti"'
cized this bourgeois cultural life. I myself belong to the gen-
eration that "went into the woods" as members of the youth
movement and utterly rejected the cultural life of the towns,
especially the opera. These gestures of protest (even the cos-
tumes with the iridescent collars) were harmless. But in the
affluent society of the second half of the century, these counter-
movements began to take on the forms of militant cultural
revolution, and were directed just as much against the politi-
cal order as a whole as they were against the domination of the
church. The age of reproduction, as Walter Benjamin called it,S
l/Culture and the Word
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dawned when, through the further development of the tech-
nology of reproduction, a veritable flood of stimuli and infor-
mation poured over mankind, which undermined the aura of
the primitive and original. This has made us less and less recep-
tive to what is unusual and demanding in culture and in works
of art. The industrial age was founded on the cultural heritage
of the bourgeois century. How will it control, alter, and trans-
form this heritage? The age of the Enlightenment questioned
even the Christian church, which had been our culture for a
whole millennium without expressly knowing itself as culture,
and in doing so, marked it out as being culture; this shows us
what a serious question we are dealing with. It may be thoughts
and considerations like this that unite us here.
If, as a philosophical historian, one wants to contribute to
this reflection, one is led back to the origins of culture, to the
basic, elemental givens, which are words and language. Words
and language obviously stand at the beginning of human his-
tory and the history of humanity. The oldest record of the
human race, as Herder calls it,
6
describes the divine creation
and how it began with the word. How does it come to be
there all at once? "And God said: let there be light."
7
Did
the word bring the light? Was the word the light? Are words
light? Does not light really become light where words are en-
countered, where runes and dumb inscriptions are deciphered
for the first time and begin to speak? Or when drawings, ac-
counts, and stories diligently handed down over the centuries
illuminate the darkness of the past for us? "Since we are a con-
versation and can hear from one another"
1
-in these lines of
Holderlin, mankind's conversation with one another and with
the divine sound like a single conversation. Because we are a
conversation, we are the one story of mankind. In constantly
discovering more early cultures and pre-cultures, more of the
oldest traces of human life, and in investigating ethnic islands
Culturt and tht Won/IJ
. .t Rousseau praised the innocence and simple
tn answer to 1 ,
. f 1 Kant admitted "Rousseau has set me right,"
2
punty o nature. .
and grounded the principle of morality on the autonomy of
moral reason, which is the same for everybody. Herder followed
Rousseau's critique of corrupting customs at least so far as to
contrast true culture to civilization.
3
That distinction proved
decisive for the German-speaking world and beyond for a long
time. The apolitical, aesthetic tone in the word, which can be
heard in the phrase uart and culture" and in our concept of" cul-
turallife," arose from this separation of the technical ordering
of life (civilized and therefore superficial) from profound cul-
ture. Schopenhauer's work became its philosophical expression
in modernity, in the nineteenth century in particular. Accord-
ing to Schopenhauer, redemption from the dreadfulness of the
blind Will that governs the whole of nature and the human
world lies in disinterested viewing, and so in art in particular.
With the rise of bourgeois society, that is with the ascent of
the bourgeoisie to equality with the court and nobility, an al-
most religious cult of art arose. This movement provided the
cultural furniture of so-called urban cultural life, whose the-
aters, museums, concert halls, and lecture halls reveal the en-
thusiasm for culture of the bourgeois centuries. Then, in the
twentieth century, a counter-movement occurred that criti-
cized this bourgeois cultural life. I myself belong to the gen-
eration that "went into the woods" as members of the youth
movement and utterly rejected the cultural life of the towns,
especially the opera. These gestures of protest (even the cos-
tumes with the iridescent collars) were harmless. But in the
affluent society of the second half of the century, these counter-
movements began to take on the forms of militant cultural
revolution, and were directed just as much against the politi-
cal order as a whole as they were against the domination of the
church. The age of reproduction, as Walter Benjamin called it,
5
and tht Word






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dawned when, through the further development of the tech-
nology of reproduction, a veritable flood of stimuli and infor-
mation poured over mankind, which undermined the aura of
the primitive and original. This has made us less and less recep-
tive to what is unusual and demanding in culture and in works
of art. The industrial age was founded on the cultural heritage
of the bourgeois century. How will it control, alter, and trans-
form this heritage? The age of the Enlightenment questioned
even the Christian church, which had been our culture for a
whole millennium without expressly knowing itself as culture,
and in doing so, marked it out as being culture; this shows us
what a serious question we are dealing with. It may be thoughts
and considerations like this that unite us here .
If, as a philosophical historian, one wants to contribute to
this reflection, one is led back to the origins of culture, to the
basic, elemental givens, which are words and language. Words
and language obviously stand at the beginning of human his-
tory and the history of humanity. The oldest record of the
human race, as Herder calls it,
6
describes the divine creation
and how it began with the word. How does it come to be
there all at once? "And God said: let there be light."
7
Did
the word bring the light? Was the word the light? Are words
light? Does not light really become light where words are en-
countered, where runes and dumb inscriptions are deciphered
for the first time and begin to speak? Or when drawings, ac-
counts, and stories diligently handed down over the centuries
illuminate the darkness of the past for us? "Since we are a con-
versation and can hear from one another"
8
-in these lines of
Holderlin, mankind's conversation with one another and with
the divine sound like a single conversation. Because we are a
conversation, we are the one story of mankind. In constandy
discovering more early cultures and pre-cultures, more of the
oldest traces of human life, and in investigating ethnic islands
Culturt and lht Wrm/ I J
. h d by the stream of world-historical tradition,
httherto unreac e
we come to know more and more of this story.
The more we become acquainted with the past and present
cultures and traditions of peoples who stand outside our Chris-
. d't' the more we realize that this is a conversa-
tsan tra 1 son,
tion that, however various its languages, always takes place
in human, learnable ones. Man "has" the word, as Ferdinand
Ebner expresses it,
9
and that is precisely what distinguishes him
from all other natural creatures. That man "has" language is
a proposition that (in philosophy, that most characteristic cre-
ation of the Greeks) arises with "science," and we encounter it
for the first time in Aristotle's Politics.
10
Aristotle calls man the
living creature that has the logos.U This takes us straight to the
heart of the matter, and brings us quite close to the primal ex-
pression of culture, the word.
'T' b 1 d " d , b "d' ,
.10 e sure, ogos oes not mean wor , ut 1scourse,
"language," "account;" ultimately, it is everything that is ar-
ticulated in discourse, thought, and reason. Thus the definition
of man that has come down to us through the centuries is that
of the animal rationale, the creature that has reason, confirm-
ing at every stage the latest pride in reason. But logos is not
"reason" but "discourse" -precisely words that one person says
to another. It is not an accumulation of words like the classi-
fied fragments that form the dictionary or so-called Worterhuch
(literally, "book of words"). Rather, the logos consists of words
already disposed toward the unity of a sense, the sense of dis-
course. We call that the unity of the sentence. But a sentence
too constitutes a fragmentation of the word. If not an entirely
artificial one, it is, strictly spe;Lking, an arbitrary unity. For at
what point has somebody completely said the words he or she
wants to say? Where does the sense end? In the unity of the
sentence? Surely, rather, in the unity of the whole discourse
that ends in falling silent. Does not the sense of what is said get
the Word


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across completely only when we fall silent, and does it not first
begin to expand in the stillness of its having been said? Ulti-
mately, don't the words first come to exist in the answer? Isn't it
then that they first become the words that were said to someone
and to which someone has had to answer? Or are these words,
too, still an abstraction? Is every word in the end an answer?
Are we not always answering when we venture a word, by which
I mean are we not trying to respond to the other, to the occa-
sion, to the issue, to the causa? In any case, the Greek expression
"logos" points toward the domain of such a correspondence: it
is not for nothing that the aforementioned definition appears
in Aristotle's Politics, in that great succession of lectures on the
basic political constitution and specific character of human-
kind, where Aristotle subjected human life in its social forms
of order and organization to his genius for observation.
The sentence with which this quotation opens already shows
the sweeping horizon in which human activity takes place, the
horizon of nature:
[N]ature makes nothing in vain. But out of all
living creatures only man has language. The sound
of the voice certainly indicates [the oppression of]
pain and [the elation of] pleasure and therefore
also occurs in other living creatures. That is to say,
nature has progressed so far that they have sensa-
tions of pain and pleasure and can show it to one
another. Language (discourse, logos), on the other
hand, is designed for exposing what is helpful and
what is harmful, and so also what is right and what
is wrong. For what is special about man as against
other living creatures is that he alone has a sense
of good and bad, right and wrong and such things,
and it is communality (solidarity) in these things
Culture and tiN Worr/1 S
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that distinguishes [the creature of] the house and
the

A noteworthy last sentence.
13
Here it is man,s having language
that sets off his form of life from that of certain kinds of herd
animals. His communication is not just the expression of a par-
ticular condition-as with, say, birds, warning cries and mating
calls-it manages to make manifest what is helpful and what
is harmful. That means pointing out things that we want to
recommend or warn against even when they do not immedi-
ately recommend themselves, perhaps because they are not very
pleasant. One thinks of bitter medicine, or of the doctor,s pain-
ful surgery, which requires a distance from what is present and
a looking forwards to what is coming. One is no longer given
over and delivered up to the rush of the moment. This, then,
is what we recognize in the essence of language: a distance by
means of which, in the breath of our voice, fleeting as it is, we
can embody everything that occurs to us, making it audible and
communicable to others. Obviously, it is this kind of distance
with respect to ourselves that opens us up to the other, and en-
ables not merely expressive gestures, or the mere warning cries
and mating calls that the animals make to one another, but
genuine efforts towards communication. The German word for
is Mitteilung which means literally "sharing
with." What a beautiful word! It involves the idea that we
share something with one another that does not become less as
a result, and perhaps even becomes more.
So by way of beginning, culture can be understood as the do-
main of all that becomes more by sharing it. The external goods
of life are the kind of things that isolate us, and where they
alone are in view they plunge us into the gloomiest solitude of
the ego: Ferdinand Ebner, again, has had profound things to
say on this subject.
14
6/Cu/turt antltht Won/

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The word is communication, sharing in its purest form. It is
not the voice of pain or pleasure that is extorted by nature, so
to speak. It rests on free agreement, kata synthekm, as Aristotle
has it.u But that doesn't mean that it's a real agreement that
people settle on in some way. Nor does it mean that the word
becomes word through a "significance-bestowing act," as one
modern philosopher has termed it. Nothing gets founded here
and nothing gets bestowed; we are always already in agree-
ment. It is only through this agreement that the word is word,
and is confirmed by every new instance of language use. We are
all familiar with the wonderfully touching illusion of parents
who celebrate their child's first word, though it's a word that
does not exist. There can be no first word, there is only being-
able-to-talk, there is only "the" word. The child's first babbling
attempts at imitation are not yet a real step toward engaging
in the exchange between you and me, surpassing the dumb ex-
change of glances.
16
The word first raises communality into words, as it were. The
right means to an end is not just what happens to be suitable,
but something selected for its suitability, like a tool designed
for a particular use. And in this respect the word, as the right
means, belongs to the common world; the world of ends itself
is correctly defined only as what is suitable and useful to all in
common, the k.oine sympheron,
17
as the Greeks said. Revealing
what is good in the sense of useful is obviously much the same
as revealing the good in the sense of right or wrong. In Aris-
totle's text, good in the sense of useful is followed by the simple
phrase "and so also with right and wrong," as though it were
self-evident.
18
To be sure, it is nature that has equipped and
organized man in such a way that, unlike animals, he sets up
his own equipment and organization in his houses and cities.
But what he sets up in this way is not nature, nor is it discourse
and words. These things exist by reason of agreement.
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IOUn a secon
sion to this truth. It is not only language that belongs to this
domain of common validity and is to that extent nomos (syn-
theke) t9 -the whole of the social life of man is dominated by
these validities, which are not necessarily laws, but regularities
existing in usage. To describe them, Aristotle found the word
from which the word "ethics" is derived: ethos. "Ethos" is origi-
nally nothing more than a habituation that has become second
nature.
20
We talk also of animals' habitual lives. But when we
talk of ethos and of the possibilities of ethics, we mean more
than merely ccestablished habits." We mean a self-conduct and
a bearing that can give an account of itself and answer for itself.
It is man's greatest honor and at the same time his greatest
peril that he is the one who chooses, so much so that he (so to
speak) "undertakes" his whole life.
The Greek expression for this undertaking is prohairesis. We
cclead" our lives, and so ultimately we try to realize the good-
the most proper, most appropriate life-on the basis of our own
choice. Nonetheless, it remains the case that human order-
ing and shaping is always already embedded in the horizon of
nature. It is just as little the case that there is a first step toward
mankind's achieving culture, as that the babbling child utters
a word when it offers the first gifts of affection to its parents.
There can be no abstract projection of our whole individual and
social life.
In Plato's utopian state we find a portrayal of an idyllic self-
sufficient community, where nobody is in conflict and there are
~ o unsatisfied needs.
21
Everyone exists together in wonderful
m n o c e ~ c e and their activity is coordinated by easily satisfied
regulattons. Now Plato, or his Socrates, calls this a city of pigs.
22
The expression " 'ty f , d
ct o ptgs oes not quite have our associa-
tions of vulgarity and pitiful luxury, but rather just means lack
8/ Cu/turt and tht Word
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of cultivation, of paideia (education). What Plato means to say
by calling this idyllic state a city of pigs is that such a state is not
at all concerned with the authentic task of man, which consists
in ruling and honoring service. The task of man (and of poli-
tics) consists in having power and not abusing it just in order
to increase it. That is the great lesson of Platonic philosophy:
only paideia, only education, can overcome man's deep-rooted
instinct of aggression. We are familiar with this as the prob-
lem of all politics from Plato to Freud, and it is the hope of all
thinkers from Plato to Freud that someday our instinct of ag-
gression might successfully be brought under control, so that
Christianity's commandment of love would be taken in earnest.
In the Greek expression paideia, there is an echo of the
light-heartedness and innocence of children's play.
23
Its authen-
tic
11
object," if we can apply this word at all, is the beautiful .
But that just refers to everything that commends itself without
being of use for anything, so that nobody asks what its purpose
is.
2
In its broadest sense,
11
the beautiful" encompasses nature
and art, customs, actions and works, and everything that com-
municates itself and, in being shared, belongs to everyone.
There is a reason why the word
11
Culture" springs to mind in
this connection. Our self-consciousness and its verbal articula-
tion were fashioned by Roman culture. When we say "nature"
or
11
Culture," we are speaking Latin. For a rural people like the
Romans, ccculture" self-evidently referred to agriculture, agri-
cultura. Now, when the Roman people learned something new
from the Greeks, from Stoic Greek humanity, this word also
came to provide the soil in which it grew. Cicero spoke first of
the cultura animi, cultivating the mind.
25
Even when he did so,
the rural way of thinking of this whole linguistic world con-
tinued to assert itself in the new concept of cultura. It is as
though it is embossed with the stamp of the care and concern
of agriculture between sowing and harvest. In the word "cui-
Cul/urt 11nd liN Worrl/ 9
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" d h sence of culture itself, we are presented not
ture an m t e es
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sure of free plav. but also with the toil of the
JUSt Wlt t e p ea '' . . .
. d h est of the spirit cult1vat1on (Btldung) toward
soWing an arv
humanity. . .
These etymological observations bnng us back to a pomt
from which we can see quite clearly what distinguishes the pos-
sibilities and dangers of humankind. "Culture" is sufficiently
serious that it does not just mean organized free time. What a
terrible phrase that is, already indicating that we are not free
enough to have free time! Culture is not the organization of our
free time: it is all that stops men from assaulting one another,
and from being worse than any animal. Worse. For animals,
unlike men, know no war: no other species fights with its own
kind to the point of annihilation.
So what kind of equipment does man have? And why should
we follow the ancient thinker
26
in according such decisive
status to "words"? Mter all, there are also other symbolizations
whereby man distinguishes himself from all the animals. He
can also recognize himself in the tools, monuments, and em-
blems that he creates and surrounds himself with. Language
is not the only symbolizing activity. Thus Ernst Cassirer once
suggested the following as a definition of culture: the universe
of symbolization, the symbolic universe.
27
It is true that taking
up "distance" belongs as much to the symbolic universe in gen-
eral as to the word. In "taking up a distance," the word achieves
two things for us: recognition of oneself in another, and rec-
ognition along with others of what is affirmed by everyone-

m our cooperation, m our goals, in our bringing about what is
just-even if it is difficult and demanding for each individual
to concede or renounce certain things. Wherever man has im-
his design on things, he can certainly be recognized in
his tools and structures. It is only in the word, though, that we
seem to reach the all-embracing empire of spirit, as it were,
10/ Culture and tht Word
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which can come into its own in the word, insofar as everything
is susceptible of being worded. Thus the word is the highest
form in which mankind can shape its world and its fate, the
1
great final syllable of which is called death, and its hope, God.

The mystery of human cultural tradition rests on the word.
The expression "tradition" itself is bound tightly to the word,
and for good reason. What we immediately understand by
11
tra-
clition" is the written information that has come to us through

writing, copying, and reproduction.
28
Of course, there is also

oral tradition, and today we are no longer as convinced as
we were about fifty years ago that poetic creations are pre-

eminently written: we have now found out how long a tradi-
tion of oral legends survived in the Albanian mountains. Since
then, we take seriously the possibility that discourse can be-
come art not only through the medium of writing but also
through mneme, through memoria, through memory. Yet writ-
ing, and the resurrection of the words out of writing, remains
I
one of the greatest mysteries of all human tradition. Our very
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own culture, that of the humanist-Christian tradition, gives
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us reason to think that this is the case, especially now, when
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the other great world religions and world cultures are just be-
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ginning to engage in a first hesitant conversation with us, and
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above all now that the massive dialogue that is opening up be-
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tween atheism and the religions has reached its hour.
19
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So we should once again make ourselves aware of what is
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specific to the Christian-humanist tradition. Nowhere does this

become so clear as in the word. If I were asked to classify the

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traditions of other cultures, and perhaps had to say whether the
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great Chinese sage Lao-Tse's
30
words were religious literature,
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philosophical literature, or poetry, I would not be able to give
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an answer; not because I do not know, but because it is only in
I

the history of Western civilization and culture that these three
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forms of discourse and the word have been disentangled and
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continuous interchange of ideas with one
deve ope , t oug
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If I had to name these three kinds of words that have d1s- 1
tinguished our tradition, I would say that there is the word of
the question, the word of the legend, and of the rec-
onciliation and the promise. It is worth exammmg these three J
forms of discourse-both independently and in their mutual
harmony.
The word of the question
31
is a restless word that reaches
from the Greeks' appetite for questioning all the way to the
thirst for knowledge of our ever-progressing research. Perhaps
the clearest way to characterize this appetite for questions is
to say that this word constantly outlives itself. Qyestioning is
what enables us to own up to our finite contingency, and to
the limitedness of our knowledge, interpretation and foresight;
in short, through it, we own up to the human situation in the
world. In modern times, human knowledge and science recog-
nize themselves in the form of the self-outstripping question, in
puzzles and questions that continually beget themselves anew;
the words "knowledge" and "science'' themselves have taken
on this connotation of research, of the further questioning that
constantly outstrips itself. But the Greeks began with the old,
immense questions:
44
Why is there anything at all rather than
nothing?" "What is in the beginning?" "What is chance?"
"What is this wonderful pattern of the paths of the stars-and
then again, what is this irregularity that we encounter in the
night sky, in that all the stars do not complete the prescribed
revolution about the center of our earth together but some seem
to stray about and are therefore called the planets?"3l
We think next of our civilization with the new kind of sci-
ence that. arose in the seventeenth century, which no longer
wants itself into the older human knowledge, and
keeps mventmg new possibilities for forward-looking ques-
Ill Culture and lht Word
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tioning, abstract constructions, and technical accomplishments
and forms of control. Our sciences are the true planets of our
human wisdom, and the task for our culture, like the puzzle
of the wandering stars for the Greek astronomers, is to tie the
planets of the knowledge-cosmos we call "sciences" back into a
system, to discover in them the organization that governs what
is, and to recognize the ordained place of human beings in the
whole of what is. All of this is the word of the question, which
continually poses itself in the most varied languages and the
most varied traditions, and is always looking for a new answer.
But alongside it stands the other word, the old rival of the
Greek religious and philosophical tradition, the poetic word of
poetry and legend. Of course "legend" is used in a fairly em-
phatic sense here, and means more than just the mythical form
of information usually called "legend" (Sagt) in the epic mem-
ory of humankind. "Legend" here designates in its entirety the
word's special claim to autonomy, not to be saying something
that would then need to be confirmed or certified, but rather
something that is certain precisely in its being said. That is the
age-old meaning of mythos, a word that for the most part gets
used somewhat inaccurately. Mythos is that which displays its
authentic power of truth only by being said repeatedly, and not
by being rigorously questioned on the strength of a certainty
situated outside the tradition of the legend. Thus a poem is
legend, in the sense that the word no longer refers to anything
outside (German specialists speak of Riftrmz here). Rather,
everything gets gathered into what is said, as it were. Now, this
kind of legend is the word at its most authentic-it is word
to such an extent that it becomes impossible to separate its
significance from its sound. Hence the ideal of poetic legend
is fulfilled in its untranslatability. Gathered into the unity of
word and sound, the word of the poem is the image of a self-
enclosed world, not of a part of the world or of anything in the
Culture and tht Won// IJ
world. Even something like Eduard Morike's famous poem on
a lampll is not just an early nineteenth-century or
thing-poem that says something about the world, but 1t 1s 1tself
world, our world, the world of man that, in what is said, ful-
fills itself to the point of self-representation in sense and sound.
"What's beautiful, though, shines as if blessed in itself" -so
goes the last line of this very poem.
Finally, within the limits appropriate to a philosopher, I
should say something about the word in the sense of the prom-
ise. There are, I think, two human experiences of this word
that we all share, even those of us to whom the gift of faith
is not granted: the word of forgiveness and the word of recon-
ciliation. We all know something about the factical reality of
such a word. We all know what a huge task forgiveness is for
the person who forgives. It is really necessary to accept the per-
son who has asked for forgiveness in such a way that he or she
is already forgiven. That is the only kind of forgiveness there
is: a word that no longer needs to be said because it has already
paved the way from the one to the other, because, through the
gesture of the word, it has already overcome the discord, the
injustice, and consequently everything that divided us.
We turn to the second example of human experience that I
mentioned: reconciliation. In the experience of reconciliation,
something of the true inner historicality of man presents itself,
as does something of his inner possibility of development; so
it is one of the deepest experiences that people can ever have.
For wherever there has been disunity, discord, and disintegra-
tion, wherever we have fallen out with one another, wherever
our sociability has collapsed-whether it is between an I and
a you, or a person and a society, or perhaps the sinner and the
always experience how the reconciliation brings an
mcrease mto the world. That is the mystery of reconciliation.
Only through m
reconc at ton can the otherness- the insuper-
1-11 Cullurt and I he Word
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able (unaufoebbare) otherness that divides man from man-
be overcome, nay, raised up (heraufgehoben) into the wondrous
reality of living and thinking in community and solidarity.
34
Thus it also communicates the Christian message that only
through the acceptance (called faith) of the ultimate reconcilia-
tion of the crucifixion, can we overcome the ultimate otherness
of our mortality, our being doomed to die.
It seems to me that our cultural tradition charges us with the
task of nurturing the three forms of the word that I have dis-
tinguished, as a pledge of their continuance: the word of the
question that outstrips itself, the word of the legend that cor-
roborates itself, and the word of the reconciliation that is like a
first and a last word.

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2
Praise of Theory
The ancients practiced the festive custom of eulogy, in which
recognizably laudable things received public praise: Gods and
heroes, love or fatherland, war and peace, justice, wisdom-
even old age, which used to be something laudable and not,
like today, something almost shameful, a defect, a cause of em-
barrassment. The lovely custom of eulogy, belonging to a world
cognizant of its ideals and sure about them, nurtured a whole
genre of eloquence that was considered an undisputed good. It
was devoted to praise of such things.
The life inclined to theory was one of the objects of eulogy,
and since the days of Socrates and Plato, there has been a genre
both of discourse and writing called "protreptic," speeches or
writings that celebrate theory. The old name for theory that
appears in these titles was admittedly different: philosophy, the
love of soph6n, of true knowledge, of knowledge of the truth.
Plato was the first to designate and define a life devoted to phi-
losophy, to pure knowledge, as the ''theoretical" ideal of life,
and precisely in so doing he challenged the norms of his home
city, Athens, and its society. For the Athenian citizens-unlike
the working classes of metics
1
and slaves-were understood as
be.ing ufree., for politics, for active participation in public life. It
m1ght also befit a growing boy-girls were never considered-
to devote a few years to theory and music: and so these were
a r means of passage and maturation, of education appro-
pnate to the phase of childhood. Even their name-paideia,
A speech given in Bonn, 3 June 198o.
16

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pedagogy-still retains a reference to the child's stage of life,
to pais, and play (paidia) .
Entering life meant entering the practice of politics. So the
word "theory" already tells us something about the thing it
refers to, about the concept itself: its proximity to mere play/ to
mere looking and wondering at something, far removed from
all use, profit, and serious business. In this respect the con-
cept of theory is defined by contrast to the word "practice,"
and this brings it into the context of the oldest experience of
life, one that appears in the common maxim that Kant himself
once dealt with: "That might be true in theory, but it doesn't
work in practice."
3
The praise of theory becomes a rebuttal of
the opposed word "practice." This was already the case in its
Greek beginnings. Do we still have occasion to listen to this re-
buttal? I confess that on the basis of my own scholarship I am
tempted to answer "yes" to this question. What did this praise
look like then?
In the early stages of human cultural development and orga-
nization of life-whether in Egypt, Babylon, or wherever ge-
ometry, algebra, and astronomy were pursued-it is clear that
the bare desire for knowledge represented an exception, re-
quiring justification by appeal to religious or practical interests.
Also, the first Greek "philosophers," other than Heraclitus,
were presumably fully active citizens of their cities, and often
their reputations were based largely on their economic or politi-
cal far-sightedness. Thus Plato's abstinence from politics, with
the word "theory" blazoned on his shield, certainly offered a
challenge, as did the foundation of the academy. This was life-
long school, membership in which seemed to require retreating
from politics and embracing the ideal of the theoretical life,
and it encouraged "philosophers" to be of no use for practical
politics. Socrates' persistent question about the good, and espe-
Prrlist of Thtory I 17
dally Plato's elaboration of it, tying it to the abstractions of
mathematics and dialectics, must of itself have appeared out of
place to the practitioners of politics and their sophistic lawyers.
In his ideal state that turns everything on its head, and
especially in the famous allegory of the cave, Plato offered a
monumental response to their doubts. According to him, the
empiricists and pragmatists live in a shadow world projected by
a fire behind them that they take for the real world, and they
must be freed by force-the force of thought-from their fet-
ters, turned around and compelled to ascend into the light of
day and the real sun. There, to be sure, they at first experience
prolonged blindness that lasts until they adapt to the bright-
ness and can look at the true world-the world of enduring
thoughts. But if they were then compelled-perhaps by civic
duty-to turn back into the cave, they would once again be
blinded-though in fact only briefiy-and would be unable to
foresee the consequences of things as well as those accustomed
to the darkness of the cave. For this reason those in the cave
consider the whole ascent to knowledge to be useless and per-
nicious: that is how Plato explains why politicians hold theory
in such disrepute.
4
To be sure, all this took place on the eve of
the free Greek city-state's final downfall; and it was barely still
true of the community for which every citizen lived.
But perhaps Plato had something in mind in describing
theory-based education that is true for all times. Not only did
education come to be occupied with theory ever afterwards:
this theoretical schooling was what Europe really inherited
from classical antiquity. In the modem state our presupposition
of bourgeois civil rights has broadened the concept: both into
universal compulsory education, on the one hand, and, with the
idea of Bildung (cultivation),
5
into a demand for adult educa-
tion on the other hand. The concept of "Bildung" still retains
something of the expectation that a theoretical occupation with
18 I Praise of Theory
h
"d , h "fr " L
things t at o not concern one, t at are ee 1rom any cal-
culation of use or utility, should be part of professional training
and belongs with the practical abilities required for it (not least
in administration and civil service). In the paradox of the phi-
losopher king, Plato articulated a lasting truth: being fit to rule
over others or to carry out any official function can mean only
knowing what is better and knowing how to perform the de-
mands of one's office. So the ideal of the theoretical life does
have political significance.
But what Plato has given us is no more than a friendly hint:
we have to continue the struggle over the ideal of a theoretical
life that has been a part of our culture since the Greeks. The
most recent phase of this struggle is now forming itself into a
philosophical concept whereby practice and the thinking that
can prove itself only in serving practice lay claim to a superior
legitimacy. From the point of view of this concept, to praise
theory as such seems completely unacceptable.
Although he celebrated the theoretical ideal of life, Plato re-
mained a citizen of his city. Even if he was a frustrated or failed
politician, for him theory and politics remained indissolubly
united. As the culture of the Greek city-state broke up into the
larger Hellenistic realms and into the Roman Empire, however,
this was to change. Aristotle wanted to legitimize the proper
balance of both, the ideal of the practical and political life and
the priority of the theoretical one, and it would certainly be
wrong to dismiss the priority he accords to theoretical life as
being merely inherited from Plato. Aristotle was probably the
first to show how the practical and political question about the
good is independent of the older, theoretical one that revolved
around cosmology. He opened his investigation of human prac-

tlce, his Ethics, with the pithy sentence: "Every art and every

t ~ q u t r y and similarly every action and choice, is thought to
atm at some good:' ' But he is just as convinced that the theo-

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retical interests that inspire every person need no justification.
The first sentence of his Metaphysics reads: "By nature all men
desire knowledge"'-by nature, not just in order to master exis-
tence and preserve life but also just to fulfill our own nature,
to achieve happiness. The priority of knowledge is recognized
even where everything depends entirely on the practical out-
come, which is the case whenever knowledge is applied-the
classic example that Aristotle had in mind, as a doctor's son,
was medicine. The aim of knowledge is fulfilled in mathemat-
ics, which deals with unchangeables, but is genuinely fulfilled
only in philosophy, which contemplates the permanent essences
of things in their very origins-their principles, as we call them.
Man's greatest joy is in .. pure theory." This is attested to by
the very fact that we are awake, that miracle of our vegetative
rhythm that means we can see and think, and so that we are
"there." Even the divine can move or fulfill itself in nothing
but enjoying the "there" which it is for itself.
Yet Aristotle well knew that it is not only in the joys of
knowledge, of insight, of understanding things and people,
measures, numbers, the world, and the divine that human self-
understanding is fulfilled; he was also concerned with the di-
versity of human practices, which raises man above the con-
straints that bind other living creatures, and lets him as a social
creature fashion his own ties, customs, and orders. Man stands
~ u t i ~ o t ~ respects-in the construction of social practice, and
10
bemg gtven to pure knowledge, seeing and thinking. He is
the creature who has the logos: he has language, he has dis-
tance from the things that immediately press upon him, he is
free to choose what is good and to know what is true-and he
can even laugh H " h
e ts a t eorettcal creature" to the core.
In the course of hist allic h' 'f
one 1e, t 1s fact has been gtven dt -
ferent emphases Aft h fi .
er t e rst ghmmer of the private began
2o I Praist of Thtory
to appear in ancient life, a person might withdraw from public
life like a Stoic; or he might take his place in it and yet, even
as a ruler of the world, hold on to communion with himself as
the proper task of his life. Or perhaps with the Epicurean, one
might resist the seductions of knowledge and research in order
to guard the tranquil peace of the garden, or, moved by the
religious longing of the age, he might gradually sink back into
positing a divine basis and origin for the world. Whatever the
case, it all involves "seeing" (Schaum): from the contemplation
(Beschaulichen) of inner freedom, through the intuition (An-
schauen) of the great world-order, to the beholding (Schaum}
of the divine. The Latin equivalent for theoria, contemplation,
seems more and more adequate to the whole of this theoretical
ideal of life.
Contemplatio-the vita contemplativa-came to be defined as
opposed to the vita activa when the spread of Christianity led
to the eclipse of the old gods of the world behind the other-
worldly God, so that the world itself no longer shared in the
reverence accorded to the gods. The ultimate goal could no
longer be to investigate it and get to the bottom of it out of
a pure joy of questioning and thirst for knowledge. From then
on, the world was thought of as God's divine creation, as the
expression of his omnipotence, wisdom, and goodness, and in-
sofar as it is included at all in the contemplatio with which the
soul turns toward God, it is nothing but a mirror, a speculum of
God: contemplatio is at the same time speculatio.
This not only turned man's theoretical passion away from the
world and back toward God, it at the same time revalued the
elemental thirst for knowledge to which Aristotle could still ap-
peal in complete innocence: the craving for knowledge becomes
curiosity (Neugier, literally "greed for novelty"), curiositas.
It is true that the mirabilia, the wonderful or the great won-
ders of the world. were always a source of knowledge about
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the world and an invitation to explore foreign parts, from the
sailors' tales in the Odyssty up to Pliny's Natural History. But
that was never Neugier or curiosity, the mindless gaping that
is always drawn in by the newest thing and never dwells on or
gets absorbed in anything. Nothing goes out of date so quickly
as what is merely new and nothing else. It asks much of human
nature to be suspicious of the desire for knowledge as curiosity.
A radical devaluation of the visible world stands behind it, as
expressed in Augustine's polemic against curiositas.
9
Again, words tell us a whole story. It goes without saying that
what is new is always ambivalent and gets taken up in contrary
ways. But it is still significant that this devaluation of the new
is rarely encountered among the knowledge-hungry Greeks.
Even the Latin equivalent, curiositas, is not used primarily in a
negative sense: it is derived from cura-care and laudable con-
cern. Even if curiosus could also, in this basically rural language,
have the devalued sense of 'Neugier," and if forward-looking
carefulness means being sure to keep a safe distance from the
kind of unwelcome novelty that can come in the future, the
tone is nevertheless still one of care and providing for the future
and precisely not one of greed ( Gitr) for what is new (neu). The
anti-gnostic position of Ambrose and Augustine was what first

gave cunos1tas 1ts uruvocally negative meaning.
Now it would certainly be wrong to attribute to the church
a general prohibition of theoretical interests. In the end, the
preference for the contemplative life, which lay behind the
monasteries, was largely what carried on the tradition of Greek
and knowledge. What would we know about antiquity
monks' diligent writing? But it is clear that this
plous actlVlty consisted more of care for the litterae than devel-
opment
0
: their own research or theoretical energies. God was
and remamed the proper object of contemplation.
When the new science took the path of methodical rigor, it
n/Praist of
ignited a true explosion that burst apart not only the Middle
Ages' geocentric view of the world, but also its theocentric one.
In the seventeenth century, after Galilee, the mathematical
construction of idealized relationships of motion was elevated
into the method of knowing reality. It succeeded in construct-
ing classical mechanics, which in the end, thanks to Newton's
combining it with celestial mechanics, ushered in a new sense
of the world that also changed the ideal of the theoretical life:
knowledge became research.
This means something new in two ways: "science" becomes
anonymous and vast. "Science" no longer takes on its shape
and reality within the individual researcher; he is one of the
many whose research contributes to science but at the same
time overturns what was previously held "true." "Knowledge"
becomes something that is constantly overcoming itsel It is no
longer doctrina- knowing, teaching, and learning what is true.
But this means, second, that it becomes a great venture,
penetrating unknown realms where neither man nor gods can
get a foothold. The path it takes-methodical research-in-
volves reason's making sure for itself. For only a malevolent
God could lead ''science" entirely astray-and then only if
he could confuse our mathematical reason. The speculative
contemplation of the divine creation in its sensuous fullness,
where God's wisdom can be worshiped, is now no longer at

tssue- mathematical abstraction discovers lawlike relationships
hidden from the senses. Only by converting empirical knowl-
edge into mathematical can the researcher approach the goal
of understanding the book of nature written by God's hand, a
goal that can never be conclusively reached.
. By subscribing to the logic of research and so presenting
ltself as self-certifying, the interest in theoretical knowledge
understands itself as extending humankind's power by way of
knowledge. It is a matter of course that precisdy in the age of
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sctence t e
theory-which not only emerges the dignity of.science but
impels the standardization of practtce-and established prac-
tices that have become firmly rooted through long habituation.
, . .
It becomes the struggle of tomorrows sctence agrunst yester-
day's science, which is supported by the practice of administra-
tion. Does practice itself know nothing?
We must ask a double question: Is there perhaps more to
theory than what the modern institution of science represents
to us? And, is practice, too, perhaps more than the mere ap-
plication of science? flue theory and practice correctly distin-
guished at all when they are seen only in opposition to each
other? It is true that even in the eighteenth century the En-
lightenment's optimism about progress did not go undisputed.
Rousseau, Herder, and Kant brought the limits of "pride in rea-
son" to general awareness.
10
When Kant, in the passage quoted
at the beginning of this chapter, champions theory against the
mistrust of practical men, he does not mean science and its ap-
plication to practice but the precedence of theory within prac-
tice itself: what a human agent knows unconditionally to be
his duty and recognizes purely out of reason, as opposed to the
faltering and uncertain calculations of self-advantage, is also
precisely what is right in practice. In fact, practical reason can
restrain rampant pragmatism, just as the Critique of Pure Rea-
son refuted the untenable hair-splitting of the rationalist dog-
matists. Growing from the Kantian impulse German idealism
tried even more fundamentally to reinstate concept of "sci-
in its full richness and to ground the unity of the theo-
and the practical philosophy of science on the primacy of
practical reason. Here "science" still has the sense of "knowl-
edge" or "i " h
n ormat1on t at survives in the ancient German ex-
II
pression von etwas Wissenschaft haben" (to have knowledge
of something) Th u r c.
us rrtssenschafislehre does not mean sctentmc
ofThtory
theory, but the philosophical derivation of human knowledge in
general. This was at the same time supposed to satisfy the fun-
damental preoccupation of modern philosophy, namely the at-
tempt to reorganize modem science back into philosophy, the
trustee of the ancient knowledge of mankind. The final attempt
to fulfill this task was undertaken by the Romantics. Hegel's
speculative synthesis of all the forms in which Spirit appears
in art, religion, and philosophy-that is, in intuition, devo-
tion, and thought-was intended to bring together the whole
truth.
11
This Romantic dream was soon exhausted. Idealism's
speculative synthesis fell before the onslaught of the empirical
sciences that were then beginning their triumphant advance.
Idealist philosophy of nature became a laughing stock, and the
idealist transfiguration of political reality was equally unable to
resist. "Progress" became the byword of the new epoch. This
inevitably pushed the ideal of theory into the background. Sci-
ence was supposed to bring universal well-being. The contem-
plative ideal proved to be only an eschatological dream when,
say, Marx saw the true humanism of the future in the abolition
(Aujhebung) of the division of labor.
12
From a philosophical point of view, bourgeois nineteenth-
century Germany came more and more under Schopenhauer's
star. This is one of the most remarkable twists of fate in the
history of thought: Arthur Schopenhauer-a child of Goethe's
time, that of romantic and idealist reaction against the ex-
tremes of the Enlightenment-published his magnum opus,
The World as Will and Representation as a Privatdozent (an un-
salaried junior lecturer) in Berlin in 1819. It went unnoticed,
only to rise again fifty years later as the fashionable philoso-
phy of the bourgeoisie, to support the cult of Richard Wagner
and ultimately to find its literary monument in the story of
Buddenbrooks.
13
Schopenhauer saw the same blind and brutish
energy of the will at work in both nature and human life, and
.

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found reconciliation with this fearful reality in pure meditation
(Bttrachtung), and in the disinterested pleasure ( Wohlgefollen)
in which all will has come to rest. This was an ad lib continua-
tion of Kant's line of thought. He saw redemption from the
blind will as brought about through the reconciling power of
art . Joining with it, the Indian wisdom that equates the path
of health with dissolving all individuality into the All-One
14
comes to complete the ideal of contemplation as release from
the pressure of an ever more prosaic reality. This became char-
acteristic of the nineteenth century's concept of art and of its
cultural life.
Given the way we have posed our question, this means noth-
ing less than that the liberal era's consciousness of progress,
based as it was on science and technology, simply set aside a
space for this kind of contemplation to escape into. This could
also be accentuated in the consciousness of the individual re-
searchers who had been freed from economic constraints by
the public authorities' financial support for science. Once it
constituted their profession, researchers could pursue their per-
sonal enthusiasm for finding knowledge more than ever. But
the process of civilization and the life of society came to be
governed more and more by the technological applications of
science. So the privilege of pure research, and the self-esteem
of theory that went with it, increasingly had to bow to the
pressure of political pragmatism. Since the beginning of our
century, our highly industrialized society has been proceeding
more and more in the direction of applied research. The purely
theoretical interests of scientific research have had to assume a
more defensive position. This defense has been carried out by
distinguishing and h b . r.
ononng 1t as as1c research necessary ,or
all scientific and t hn 1 al '
. ec o og1c progress. In the age of the new
social utili
tarlanlSm that has filled the twentieth century, such
research became a modest sanctuary that protected the inter-
26/Praist oj'Thtory

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ests of pure theory without in any way restricting the generally
pragmatic perspective. Even when theory is valued in this way,
then, it serves the praise of practice. Theory has to justify itself
in the forum of practice.
The scientifically shaped cultural consciousness of modernity
has certainly gone hand in hand with an increasingly active cri-
tique of culture, which intensified still further at the beginning
of our century. As alienation from modern labor and cultural
life (Bildung) grew, various protest movements appeared, such
as the great romantic children's crusade of the youth movement
before the First World War, which already marked the thresh-
old of the technocratic age. The full outbreak of this age was
the technological slaughter of the First World War. European
optimism about progress and bourgeois cultural idealism could
not survive this catastrophe. Spengler's vision of the decline of
the West perfectly expressed this feeling of shakenness.
15
The
idealist concept of the self-realization of Spirit could not re-
main obligatory, especially as the academic forms of philoso-
phy had not moved beyond variations on the idealist syntheses
of Goethe's time. Self-consciousness, that fundamentum incon-
cossum of neo-Kantian Cartesianism/
6
and the epistemology
based on it, lapsed into deeper doubt disseminated partly by the
era's great romancers, partly by Nietzsche's extreme radicalism,
and partly by ideology critique and psychoanalysis.
The eight decades we can survey of our century's world wars
and world crises seem strangely unified under this universal
aspect, presumably because philosophical consciousness has re-
mained fairly constant since the crisis of the First World War.
The consciousness of the time that it reflects has, in the end,
persisted to an astonishing extent through all the to and fro of
shon-term variations. The First World War shattered Europe's
self-consciousness. Despite the dissimilarity of their c:xperi-
Praise o/ Thloryl ZJ
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at rising continents of America and Russia
ences, t e two
should have been made equally sensible of their limits by the
Second World War and its consequences. The endangered self-
consciousness of our epoch is no longer defined so much by the
shifts in these powers' political interrelations or the fundamen-
tal dissimilarity of their economic and social systems, as by the
inexorable law of progressive industrialization, which applies in
the same way to both of them.
The second half of our century has begun to see the spread
of this industrialization over the entire globe. We do not know
which tensions will drive the global spread of this process until
the unequal development of the countries of this earth reaches
equilibrium. Nor do we know whether the life-threatening dis-
proportion between the strength of our weapons and the frail
wisdom that characterizes the culture of the human race today
will plunge humanity into catastrophe and self-destruction. But
in any case it is no longer just the romantic critique of culture
or the resentful impotence of blind revolt that is undermining
faith in progress. The pattern of increasing welfare, rising stan-
dards of living, and universal leveling has turned out, on its
own terms, to be just as utopian as the moral confidence of
the first age of Enlightenment. That confidence was refuted
by Rousseau's famous answer to the Dijon Academy's contest
17 ,... d .
question. lO ay, 1t seems, there is no need to assert that the
future path of humanity depends on things other than techno-
logical inventiveness and skill in dealing with the bottlenecks
of global industrialization .
All this must be reflected in the philosophical efforts of
our century. The primacy of self-consciousness which must
be considered the hallm k f d ' 1 1
. ar o mo ern philosophy, IS c ose Y
connected With m d . t:-
0 ern concepts of sc1ence and method. ~ o r
modernity's concept of method is distinguished from ancient
28/ Praist of Thtory
ways of understanding and explaining the world precisely by the
fact that it represents a way of self-certification. The primacy
of self-consciousness is the primacy of method. This should
be taken literally: only what can be investigated by method is
the object of a science. But this implies that there are mar-
ginal cases and gray areas of half-sciences and pseudo-sciences
that don't fully satisfy the conditions of scientificity and yet are
perhaps not devoid of valuable truth. Moreover, the possibili-
ties of modern science are limited in a far more fundamental
way. There will always be areas that fundamentally cannot be
approached through objectivization and treated as methodical
objects. Many of the things in life are of this kind, and a few
gain their unique significance from precisely this fact.
For a start, there is the other person, who is just as much an I
as I am myself. In philosophy we know this as the transcenden-
tal problem of intersubjectivity. How can something that has to
find the ultimate proof of its identity in our self-consciousness
and is determined as an object of our consciousness in this way,
itself be something that is not simply a given object of our per-
ception but is for itself and is itself self-consciousness? This
is not just a question of justification that makes problems for
transcendental philosophy. Being-for-itself seems to present an
ultimate closedness that no systematic observation can break
open, a final refusal and an inaccessible otherness. And yet our
experience is just the opposite. It is precisely in interpersonal re-
lations that people open themselves up to the kind of intimacy
that does not allow me to experience the other as another, as a
limit to my own being-with-myself, but rather as an intensifi-
cation, extension, and restoration of my own particular being,
or even as breaking my self-willed obstinacy, and so helping me
learn to recognize what is real. What is this intimacy?
Or we could take another example, which will then also im-
m d' '
e lately introduce a problem of modern science. I mean ones
I

bod . The processes that take place in it, on which our
own Y. 'nl h b' f ' fi
health or illness depends, are certat y t e o o sctent
1
c
research; and scientific medicine, rather than practicing an in-
explicable healing, is proud to look for ways of influencing them
that are based on scientific knowledge, and for treatments that
can promise a cure. But again it is still much more than the
limit of the doctor's knowledge, which is often quite plain to
him, that allows him to encounter the bodiliness of the other as
something beyond his perspicuity. The real puzzle is rather that
each individual is profoundly intimate with his own body-so
intimate that he even finds it disturbing if it comes to his at-
tention at all-and yet it thoroughly conceals itself from the
observer. We might ask again what this intimacy is: it is cer-
tainly not a higher or a lower form of self-consciousness. And
my body is just as little an object for me as is the other person,
with whom I am intimate and who is intimate with me.
The examples of intimacy I have chosen are not as arbi-
trary as they might appear when we consider the unfathomable
depths of unreflective intimacy that support us: from the most
trivial habits to the magic of home, mother tongue, childhood
experience, and so on. These examples have special significance
in the context of our inquiry. The intimacy that each of us has
with his own body does not just consist in superseding (auf-
heben) or rendering unremarkable the otherness of the other
that the naturalness of our own body represents for our con-
. D aa
SClous asem. Because the body presents itself as something
with which we are intimate and not like an obstacle it is pre-
cisely what sets us free and lets us be open for wha; is. Simi-
larly, we have seen that the individual's immersion in the vari-
of human and social intimacy does more than merely
lim1t the extent to which we can be reduced to objective ob-
servers. It is precisely h fir ..
w at st teaches us, in our recogmt1on
of the other, to recognize reality, and so lets us also acknowl-
edge the reality of far-off times and foreign peoples.
Here we touch the root of what we can call theory: see-
ing what is. This does not mean merely determining what is
in fact present. Even in science, a ufact'' is not defined. as
what is merely present-at-hand that can be fixed by measuring,
weighing, and counting; "fact" is rather a hermeneutic concept,
which means that it is always referred back to a context of sup-
position and expectation, to a complicated context of inquiring
understanding. What is not quite so complicated, but all the
more difficult to achieve, is for each individual in his practical
life to see what is, instead of what he would like to be. The
fundamental elimination of prejudices that science requires of
its researchers may well be a laborious process, but it is always
easier than overcoming the illusions that constandy arise from
one's own ego (that of an individual, group, people, or culture
to which the person belongs and listens) in order to see what
is.
19
The secret of all government-the evil of power and its
counterpart, the wisdom of political assembly-is hidden here.
It seems helpful to recall here the original Greek sense of
theory, theoria. The word means observing (the constellations,
for example), being an onlooker (at a play, for instance), or a
delegate participating in a festival. It does not mean a mere
"seeing" that establishes what is present or stores up informa-
tion. Contemplatio does not dwell on a particular entity, but in
a region. Theoria is not so much the individual momentary act
as a way of comporting oneself, a position and condition. It is
"being present" in the lovely double sense that means that the
is not only present but completely present. Participants
10
a ritual or ceremony are present in this way when they are en-
grossed in their participation as such, and this always includes
their participating equally with others or possible others. Thus
Praist


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t n the first instance a behavior whereby we
t eory IS no 1
trol an object put it at our disposal by explammg 1t. It has to
do with a good of another kind.
There are two essentially very different kinds of goods. The
first are those that we try to acquire in order to use them or
have them in our possession so that it is possible to use them. It
is part of the nature of these goods that what one person
sesses and puts to use another person cannot have. These are
the goods that are to be distributed, and the efforts of modern
government are directed toward distributing them justly. And
then there are goods of another kind, whose belonging to one
person does not prevent their belonging to others. These actu-
ally belong to nobody, and for just that reason they are some-
thing in which each individual has a full share. To distinguish
the two ways of "having, a good, Augustine used the opposi-
tion of uti and frui, of making use of something and using it
up, by contrast to dealing with something in a way that bears
its own fruit.
20
What was most important to Augustine was
contemplation directed toward God-he condemned the desire
for worldly knowledge as curiosity. But all the other ways we
resist looking only for the useful and behave "purdy theoreti-
cally,'' all the areas we call art and science (but certainly not just
those), belong here too. Whenever we find something beau-
tiful,, we don't ask about the why and wherefore of it. Would
a human life that failed to participate in this kind of
44
theory,
seem human to us at all?
Is it so romantic to speak of theory as a life force in which
all have a share? You don't have to be an appointed
eulogst of theory to realize that theory is not exhausted by
being of immed'
1
at .
e serv1ce to practice. To be sure, humamty
has slowly improved life through a learning process that has
countless millennia, by constantly making new inven-
tions and developing new capabilities, starting with mastering
J' I PraistofThtory

fire as a weapon, as well as a source of warmth and a beginning
of technology. But it is no self-evident matter that theoretical
consciousness should have awakened and science should have
been developed among the intelligent and inquisitive people of
ancient Greece. There are great and mature cultures, not back-
ward in the slightest, that have nevertheless not taken the step
to theoretical science.
Isn't there something funny, though, about how someone
as sober as Aristotle imagines that theoretical knowledge was
first begun? The Greek conviction of the time was that the
Egyptians were responsible, since it was there that the caste
of priests, freed from having to work for the necessities of life,
had the leisure to create idle theories.
21
The pragmatic model
suggesting that the superfluous and the beautiful can be nur-
tured only when the necessities have been provided clearly will
not do.
In his Republic, Plato showed quite clearly that, as modem
civilization is now experiencing so dramatically, the viewpoint
of needs and desires opens up a perspective that in itself is un-
limited.22 The condition of happy concord between needs and
their satisfaction is not a human condition. For needs grow of
their own accord. Htdont (desire) belongs to the class of the
aptiron (limitless).
We do not have to rely on our self-awareness to tell us
that the complete satisfaction of human needs cannot be a
pre-condition whose fulfillment is necessary before theory is
possible. Our historical research also tells us plainly enough-
what we experience dramatically in our world- that the view-
point of needs and desires is of itself unlimited. And yet, as
the spadework of research during the early years of this cen-
tury revealed more about human pre-history, we came to see
more clearly that even then we were concerned with more than
mere survival. The path of mankind has been attended all along
PNist of Thtory I .J.J






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by burial rites; and whatever else mean, whatever
t death or even recogmt1on and acceptance of
protest agams
death they might imply,
23
the consecrations that these tombs
bring to light divulge a constantly surprising wealth of super-
fluous decorations, and not a confinement to what is necessary.
So our more recent theorizing about the history and origins of
culture-as illustrated by Aristotle's explanation of the beauti-
ful and the purely theoretical as products of later priestly idle-
ness-clearly shows only limited signs of being enlightening.
But in casually construing history in this way, Aristotle really
wants to establish something more. Human life desires the
"good."
14
Like all living things, man is concerned with his own
self-preservation. This thought occurs to him of itself: but he is
also a thinker. Each of us asks himself how he should live. He
seeks his fulfillment in a happy life-and that is not something
that is exhausted by acquiring things and being successful; life
is also devoted precisely to what is, to what is to be seen and
what is beautiful to see. The great master of those who have
since come to know,
15
whose Physics (which is in many ways
so false and in many ways so human) held good for two thou-
sand years, was the first to develop a practical philosophy that
found systematic ideas even in human drives and was the first
,
to explore the various ways of constituting socio-political life.
Nevertheless it was no accommodation to others' beliefs and
lack of consistency that led him to admit the priority of the
deal of the theoreticallife.
16
He cannot have meant that some-
one could ever have a wholly contemplative life as if he did not
tied to his own body and embedded in the practical and
politlcal relationships from which he must collect what is true
and ' al W
essenta e cannot choose whether to be gods or men-
and as men we are not like ever-watchful gods, but are bodily
natural creatures A
. s men we are also always men among men,
SOClal creatures, and it is only from within human practice that
JIIPraist ofThtory
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one person or another can turn for a while toward pure knowl-

edge from time to time.
Could this solve the old problem of Aristotelian theology-
that God's "thinking" cannot think anything but itself, al-
though thinking must still always be thinking of something
and only "additionally" directed to itself as well?
17
If noein is
theorein,
28
there is no meaningful question as to what the object
of this contemplation can be: for us, the highest fulfillment of
our "there" is the "how" of being abandoned to what is, not a
"self-consciousness," but just that intensification of living that
the Greeks called theoria. For them, the divine consisted in
precisely the lasting present of this intensification.
It would not be hard to show that modern science always
presupposes this concept of theory as a condition of its own
existence. But where does that get us? In returning to the
basic constitution of mankind, are we actually still dealing with
theory, or with practice and interactions between people and
things that we certainly could not call theoretical? Can this
be right? Is theory ultimately a practice, as Aristotle already
stressed/
9
or is practice, if it is truly human practice, always
at the same time theory? Is it not, if it is human, a looking
away from oneself and looking out toward the other, disregard-
ing oneself and listening for the other? Life, then, is a unity
of theory and practice that is the possibility and the duty of
everyone. Disregarding oneself, regarding what is: that is the
behavior of a cultivated, I might almost say a divine, conscious-
ness. It does not need to be a consciousness cultivated by and
for science; it only needs to be a humanly cultivated conscious-
ness that has learned to think along with the viewpoint of the
other and try to come to an understanding about what is meant
and what is held in common.
. But what has happened to our praise of theory, then? Has
It become a praise of practice? Just as the individual who
Proist ofThtoryiJS

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needs relevant knowledge must constantly reintegrate theoreti-
cal knowledge into the practical knowledge of his everyday life,
so also a culture based on science cannot survive unless ratio-
nalizing the apparatus of civilization is not an end in itself, but
makes possible a life to which one can say "yes., In the end, all
practice suggests what points beyond it.
J6/ Praist o[Thtory

..
3
The Power of Reason
The underlying conviction of all kinds of enlightenment is a
faith in reason and in its triumphant power. What we today call
"philosophy" is understood as bringing about such enlighten-
ment. This is the case not only in the West, where something
we now call "science" has been developed in a double move-
ment: the Greeks' overcoming mythological consciousness on
the one hand, and on the other, emancipation from the pres-
sures of authoritarian medieval church doctrine. Even extra-
European cultures, old and young, reflect the appropriation of
modern science in European thinking, whether one views the
positivism of scientific theory, economic materialism, or the
idealism of freedom as the real secret of modem civilization.
If philosophy were really the true science of reason, or the rea-
son of science, then there would be no doubt that reason in the
shape of Philosophy could today justly resume the truly domi-
nant position in human life that she used to possess as queen
of the sciences.
But in fact it hardly seems meaningful to ask whether reason
has power any more, when what all human experience expresses
is precisely the impotence of reason: the power of passion that
can ravish an individual despite all his rational intentions; the
might of economic, social, and political power-interests that
prevail against all constitutional, democratic, or socialist prin-
ciples; the madness of destructive wars in which one people is
incited against another (as though war could ever be a lesser
evil in comparison to some other greater); and now as the final
A speech given in Vienna, 2 September 1968.
37





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the victory of modern science, we have the
consequence o . , .
breathtaking specter of all mankind s self-destruct1on through
misuse of atomic energy.
Yet not only the thinker discern behind the obvious im-
potence of human reason. everybody's hope and trust that in
the end reason will still win the day. Not only does he hope that
as individuals continue to turn to reason it might bring about
great forms of rational compromise in human life. He also has
reasons to believe so. It may be difficult to recognize what is
rational as long as our own interests fixate us blindly on what is
closest, but people still unite when they are faced with obvious
unreason. All we have to do is make what is unreasonable stand
out as such. If we do so successfully, then reason, wherever it is
brought to words, develops an irresistible power. What are the
conditions under which it can exhibit this power? Where can
we find them? How can we produce them?
At this point, it seems, the plot thickens. It all comes down
to the fact that the conditions under which we could speak of
reason in all things seem rather utopian. So we must ask our-
selves how it ever comes about that reason is actually brought to
words. Reason obviously makes an immediate reference to the
universal. When nothing holds sway as reason, it is continually
. '
necessary to gam everyone s consent. This can be seen most
clearly in the sciences that deal with the pure objects of rea-
son: mathematics and logic. Their objects exhibit the rational
procedures that produced them, which makes their irrefutable
truth plain, and the same is the case wherever reason exercises
such self-governance. Sometimes this can even lead to surpris-
ing implications, as when, for instance, we are dealing with
decidability of propositions or the mutual compatibility of
mdependendy rationally derived propositions. But it is incon-
that only reason and nothing else can be of further
ass1stance here.
JB/Tht Power of Reason
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Now these are admittedly examples of sciences of pure rea
son. But since the Enlightenment ideal of gaining new knowl-
edge of the world by means of pure reason and conceptual
analysis was rendered untenable by Hume's skepticism and by
Kanes Critique of Pure Reason, "science, has come to mean
not so much "science of reason, as "science of experience:' It
may be that our reason keeps clinging to the idea of recogniz-
ing "reason'' in the organization of the world as the goal of all
research, but it does not expect any success except through the
process of experience, and the progress of individual research.
The very idea that there could be reason in history, that the
course of human affairs could still satisfy the demands of rea-
son once it is no longer read as a divine story of religious prom-
ise and hope, seems wholly illegitimate as a regulative idea,
even to historical research itself: to this extent the standpoint
of experience, and especially of the historical experience that
mankind has had of itself, has discredited faith in reason.
And yet the whole of our modern faith in science remains
indirect evidence of the power of reason, and one does well to
be aware of both the value and the limitations of this evidence.
The old faith that human reason is a copy or image, a piece
or seed of God's infinite reason that controls the making and
course of the world, does not of itself legitimize modem sci-
ence and its discoveries. It seems, rather, to be the other way
round: it is the ingenuity of scientists that provides no trifling
evidence of the power of reason. For the devdopment of sci
ence confronts each and every man with the limits of his own
reason and his own capacity for judgment. So it is our being
educated in science, above all, that now makes us critical of
hearsay and restricts the know-all's na1ve analogies based on
Particular experiences. But docs the existence of science in this
sense guarantee the victory of reason?
The fathers of Western culture, the Greeks, not only created

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its utopian organizations and arrangements,
to emons ra ,
what a huge and almost superhuman t ~ k it is. for people to di-
rect their thinking beyond their own 1mmed1ate advantage-
and he specified education in the sciences, mathematics, music,
and astronomy as the path to this goal. And Aristotle, in addi-
tion, soberly analyzed the connection that exists between the
human capacity for theoretical interests and the way educa-
tion in the family and the social system forms human beings.
Devoting oneself entirely to "theoretical pursuits" presupposes
"practical knowledge" -the guiding force of reason in human
action and behavior. This is what really constitutes "reason," its
power or its impotence. It is not simply a faculty one has, but
something to be cultivated, and its cultivation should serve that
political science which, as "scientia practica sive politica,"
1
has
cooperated with the self-governance of practical reason in vari-
ous historically changing forms, right down to the centuries of
modern science. As a practical knowledge of practical reason,
it teaches us the conditions under which reason becomes prac-
tical. It points out the forces that derive from the very fact that
we live together as people, without thereby limiting reason's
critical capacity for distinguishing the better from the worse.
For this practical reason is certainly not, as Aristotle of course
occasionally has it,
1
limited to just the means of bringing about
~ i v n ends. It is not some practical sense that always finds the
nght means and the right way to whatever end is being sought.
?n the contrary, "rationality" (Vernunfiigluit) is a way of hold-
mg oneself, which one holds onto and which holds one, so as
to keep on re-creating and protecting the moral and human
order that is established in common norms.
3
In Aristotle the
talk is only of means to an end because identification with the
-IOITht Ptl'f.M' of &ason
b
communal, with what is best in general, is already presupposed
before any action is considered. Precisely because "practical rea-
son" is always at the same time concerned with concretizing
what might fulfill the meaning of life, with what forms tudai-
monia, the unity of "practical science" maintains itself through
all kinds of changes in social relationships-from the ancient
slave society through the Christian feudalism of the Middle
Ages, the bourgeois constitution of city guilds, the formation
of the modern civic state amid sovereign governments and the
emancipation of the "tiers etat" (third estate), right up to our
own day. Only as the idea of science began to be completely
subordinated to the self-understanding of modem natural sci-
ence, to its idea of method and its demand for verification,
has the knowledge intrinsic to this "practical science" been de-
prived more and more of its legitimacy.
Now, what modem science has brought humankind is really
something quite extraordinary: the domination of nature on a
whole new scale and in a whole new sense. For the methodi-
cal procedure that had its first great successes in Galileo's and
Huygens' mechanics
4
and found its philosophical expression in
Descartes' concept of method
5
fundamentally altered the re-
lationship between theory and practice. Human practice, with
all its possibilities for dominating nature and for inventing and
making necessary and beautiful things, no longer saw itself as
restricted to filling areas that nature had left open for it; and
theoria, knowledge about the natural order of things, could no
longer be seen as "above all of that" on the grounds that it
deals with what is beautiful and so serves no end. By means
of abstraction, measurement, and calculation, the new knowl-
edge penetrated the laws that control nature, isolated the part
~ h t each individual factor played in the result and so, wherever
lt was successful, disclosed conditions that man himself had
the power to alter, so that people could bring about the results
Tht Power of &asonl -11
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Although the new science was directe.d as ex-
they wante
clusivdy as ever toward finding out nature-deciphering
. Wl 'th wonder and discovenng the laws that order
1
ts mystenes
it, which leave all human forms of law infinitely far
behind them-it now consisted in knoWing vanous possibili-
ties for governing natural processes, and it therefore of itself
entered the boundlessly expanding realm of human practice.
The course of research that revealed pre-eminently the con-
struction of matter, and with it the possibilities for materially
transforming the givens of nature (Francis Bacon's ideal), was
certainly a laborious one. At first it was only the lowest levels of
the material and economic substructure of the realms of social
practice that were altered and enriched. But when the ways in
which human society is organized were subordinated to human
reason, it certainly marked no categorical change in the knowl-
edge involved in planning and construction that had had such
immense success in controlling nature. For me it is the very
signature of our epoch that, after the persistence of precedent
hdd us back for so long, a real attempt is being made to ground
the organization of society on the discoveries of empirical sci-
ence. Does the completion of this undertaking perhaps signal
the definitive victory of reason? Is the much-decried impo-
tence of reason with respect to the passions and the interests
of individuals and groups in the end just a vestige left behind
in a rationally administered world, which we should be able to
eliminate rationally through individual psychology, social eco-
nomics, and scientific politics?
Perhaps it is this trust that prevents people from being upset
by the fact that the Eastern and Western forms of social orga-
are today so sharply opposed to one another. After all,
lt mtght always turn out that after countless setbacks attempts
. '

a solution by force, repressions, and regressions, the
mevttable demands f al b . . . }
o ration o ligation (rattonale Sachzwang
.P ITht Powtr of Reason
will come ever more dominantly into force in both East and
West and will bring in changes in both places that will weaken
the opposition between the world-views, social conditions, and
forms of government, and ultimately end in the equilibrium of
a perfectly administered world that nothing further will be able
to disturb. Is this the power of reason in which we trust? And
are we, as philosophers, sworn to this ideal?
However optimistic one is and however little a skeptic, one
can still be a little dubious about all this. Old Platonic strains
force themselves upon the ear: science that transforms itself
into practice; ability that, because it can, also must, always de-
veloping new abilities that reach further and further-is this
what reason consists in? Plato once had his Socrates remind a
young admirer of the new sophistic art of discourse and argu-
mentation about bodily nourishment: the cook's Battering art
cannot succeed against the rational advice of the doctor-and it
is especially necessary in the case of spiritual nourishment that
one have enough reason to judge how wholesome it is.
6
lndeed,
reason would be in control only when what can be done is not as
good as done already, just because it can be done. Now, in mod-
ern industrial society the reason that guides what can be done is
surely always at work, whether as the commercial reason of the
producer assessing the market or the planner assessing demand
and setting the priorities for satisfying it or whatever. And all
of them will make use of scientific advice in their planning,
just like the officials who administer public matters, including
so-called culture politics. Mter all, it is not only in business, or
wherever economic questions come into play, that people turn
to scientific rationality. Rather, it is altogether characteristic of
an age that typically converts science into practice that science
commands attention whenever it has something to say. A good
example of this is the role played by so-called experts in the
modern judicial system. A court, in trying its cases, is scarcdy
TIN Pr!wn-of Rtasonl .,J

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. d t exercise its right to pronounce sentence in the abM
penmtte o . .
1
sence of or contrary to expert opmton.
Now we do know that the specialization of modern research
ari1
P
.,oduces a specific kind of blindness, because spe-
necess y
cialists can see only what is accessible to their own particular
methods. This is known, and science is becoming ever more
aware of it and takes it into account by making the phenomena
marginal to one discipline, falling outside its methodological
competence, the central focus of another, new discipline of
systematic research, trying in this way to combat the dangers
of specialization; and widely diverse research orientations con-
cerning an object can often be fruitfully integrated. All this
seems no more than reasonable.
But Plato draws his ingenious picture with more and difM
ferent things in mind than this. He is not recommending the
doctor's dietary authority as a model for rationally monitoring
cultural politics and subjecting it to state censorship (like the
critique of poetry caricatured in the Statesman ).
1
On the con-
trary, he is emphasizing how incompatible is "spiritual nour-
ishment" with the way it is proffered to people by the new
rhetoric. For this nourishment-that of convictions imparted
through speech -cannot be tested before it is brought to table,
but instead goes straight in, and anyone who listens to these
ideas and allows himself to be talked into them has already been
taken in by them. This is the danger that attends all "speak-
ing" (&dm) whether in education and training or in public life .
What possesses us in this way makes us prepossessed. Now, no
~ u m a n community is possible without the power of convinc-
mg speech that reaches everybody, and the new rhetoric of the
modern mass media is actually similar to the sophistic paideia
of fifth century Athens, and even exceeds it because the tech-
nological form of its dissemination no longer offers the listener
or reader any speaker on the other side to whom one could
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oneself address one's own words: this new rhetoric, just like
the old kind, forestalls all critical consideration and summons
the power of the self-evident. Everything that is self-evident,
that has become self-evident or has been stated persuasively
until it achieves self-evidence, necessarily pre-determines even
methodical research, its choice of how to frame its questions
and the evaluation of its results. The judgments of expert wit-
nesses who answer in court for their results, as well as the pub-
lic that accepts them, are even more affected and restricted in
this way. We call these prior determinants of our judgment our
prejudices. Now the Enlightenment wanted to strive against all
prejudices: freedom from prejudice, the Enlightenment slogan,
found the concretization of its theory in the ideal of presup-
positionless science. Wasn't that the final victory of Enlighten-
ment? A real victory?
It is true that the fundamental and essential law of science
is to leave no prejudice untested, to subject all phenomena that
are not understood or cannot yet be controlled to a theoretical
investigation so that science can master them. The objection
that specialized scientific methodology is just as subject to the
new rhetoric (today called the formation of public opinion) as
the public sphere itself is certainly not valid for genuine re-
search without further ado. But it has nothing at all to do
with what results the researcher himself gets from his research,
but only how these results enter the public consciousness. And
precisely because this is the decisive point, the new Enlighten-
ment, like the old rhetoric, has taken this as its starting point.
The formation of public opinion rightly plays a significant role
in the new science of society, and scientific research is trying
to devise scientific means of guiding opinion formation. In-
creasingly, specialists in opinion formation-opinion pollsters,
advertisers, sociologists, social psychologists, and political ana-
lysts-are extending the circle of scientists whose judgment
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Of th
em to be sure, can avoid the rules and proce-
counts. one '
dures of modern science, especially if they take their responsi-
bility as men of science seriously. The law of rules
body 1
n this way.. The efforts of the soctal researcher
over every
are aimed at controlling the objects they study and overcoming
their resistance to that research-but that means they make
them usable for any ends we please. It is in the nature of the
thing: the real public responsibility of science that has troubled
the researcher's conscience since Hiroshima cannot be borne
by any science as such. Scientific reason is not the reason that
serves the classical scientia practica e/ politica.
This has its immediate expression in what I might call the
incomprehensibility of science. This has existed all along, and
to a greater degree since higher mathematics became indispens-
able for modern measuring and manufacturing. But it passed
completely into the public consciousness and had public conse-
quences only when the modem social sciences began to control
social practice. For this has made identifying with the univer-
sal-and what else is reason?-into the most burning problem
of our social life. How is this supposed to succeed when a poli-
tics of public opinion formation brings to bear scientific judg-
ment, which resists critical examination by laymen, against the
formation of any individual judgment? Does genuine participa-
tion in socio-political life that reaches beyond specialized voca-
tional training not become impossible when all communication
is targeted at the formation of particular opinions, and obliga-
tions have everywhere been brought into effect that necessitate
things' being as they are and not otherwise? Here lies the root
of the suspicion of the establishment harbored by young people.
But we all witness it. Experiences come to words in language
common to us all, in new words that enter common usage.
There are two words in particular-one of them young, the:
other, although older, embracing an almost limitless realm-
-
which even just in the way they are formed betray how much
-
we all fed a loss of freedom and the impossibility of identifying
s
with the universal: "technocracy', and "bureaucracy.,, Clearly,
r
both word-forms are modeled on the word
44
autocracy,, -in
s
any case they share with the word "autocracy,, (and not with
similar words like "aristocracy" or
4
'democracy,} the stigma of
e
e
impotence in the face of superior potency, and this not just in
:i
the sense in which all rational obligation restricts and debili-
e
tates one's own will. For what both these words express is the
.t
need to look at things rationally and identify with one's own
insight. Just as the will of an autocrat makes all identification
e
with universal interests impossible because he is not bound by
d
the universal of law and justice (eighteenth-century juridical
hermeneutics was explicitly limited by the will of the overlord},

-
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so someone who is seen as a technocrat is the representative of


-
an alien power inaccessible to reason. He remains a challenge
>l to both the individual and social need to be rational, even if


-
no one doubts that his plans and intentions are backed by the
n reason of science and if he is an expert on the whole apparatus

of public opinion formation. Reason may tell us that the plan-

-
-
ner of new things necessarily stands in tension with the status
.e
quo-think of, say, town planning instigated by architects-
t-
but this kind of insight cannot bridge the gap between the ex-
L-
perts and the reason or unreason of laymen.
n
And, finally, "bureaucracy," acknowledged as the basic evil in
l-
the rational administration of the world, bemoaned and resisted
:e
under every form of modern state and yet still making lively
>t
progress for apparently inescapable material reasons, this oldest
..
insult hurled by peasants and commoners at the governors and
...
re
authorities, attacks, in the name of a reason attempting to
,
e.
be common and universal, not only the unintelligibility but

&C
the unintelligence of administrative activities. Their scorn thus
-
co . d h
ncelve defends the last bastions of a common reason, t e
Tht 1'fnuer of /Vas on I -11
H
litus
demanded we should follow, and for which_
reason erac
as what is commonly held to apply, as the nomoi-he urged us
t'll more valiantly than for the walls of the city.
9
to stnve s 1
Or is the situation of reason, of actually identifying with the
universal, not so hopeless after all? Don't worry that I'm going
to conclude by recommending philosophers as the experts of
reason, so that the power of reason can finally be raised beyond
all doubt by filling our panel of experts. We should be care-
ful not to make fools of ourselves, especially by claiming that
our specialty is the universal that is reason: let alone that rea-
son should come to power through us. But perhaps it is, all in
all, a contradiction in terms that reason should have power and
c:xercise governance, and perhaps it is quite in order that the
strange guild of philosophers should remain almost invisible in
the real power struggles between peoples, states, classes, reli-
gions, world-views, and economic systems. We do not speak in
the name of reason. Anyone who speaks in the name of rea-
son contradicts himself. For it is reasonable to acknowledge
that one's own insight is limited and for just that reason to be
capable of better insights, wherever they may come from.
To be sure, this definition is so universal that it applies equally
to scientific reason insofar as every researcher always knows that
he can himself be surpassed. But for just this reason science

perststs m tts ways. It is nevertheless reasonable, as we saw, to
be aware that science is limited by its inability to reflect on its
own presuppositions and consequences. This too is an insight
that overcomes a prejudice, just like when an individual cor-
old with a new insight. Reason always consists
10
not blindly insisting on what one holds true but engaging
.. all ,
CfltlC
. Y w1th tt. This IS still what enlightenment does, but not
10
the dogmatic form of a new absolute rationality (Rationali-
tat) that always knows better-reason also needs to be grasped
with respect to itself and its own contingency in a process of
constant self-enlightenment.
The words that Symmachus, an honorable heir of ancient
culture, directed on behalf of ancient Roman tradition against
the new religion's claim to power, still speak today in the name
of reason against all dogmatism wherever it may arise:
Uno itinn-e non potest pn-veniri ad tam grande stcrttum.
10
We cannot arrive at such a great secret by one path alone.


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4
The Ideal of Practical Philosophy
The problems of practical reason arise in many areas but pri-
marily, in my opinion, with respect to the self-understanding
of the human sciences! What position do the humanities, the
Geistuwissemchaftm, occupy in the scientific cosmos? [I shall
try to show that the only productive or appropriate way for the
human sciences to think of themselves is on the model of Aris-
totle's practical philosophy rather than the modern concept of
scientific method. I shall lead into this provocative thesis with
a short historical summary of the situation.]
When the ancient Greeks discovered the concept of science,
this was the true turning point when what we call Western
culture was born: science is the glory of our culture but per-
haps also, if we compare it with the great cultures of Asia, its
undoing. For the Greeks, science was essentially represented
by mathematics-the genuine, and the only, science of reason.
Mathematics deals with what is unchangeable, and only where
something is unchangeable can we have knowledge of it with-
out having to take another look from time to time.
In one way, modem science has had to retain this axiom in
order to understand itself as science at all. The unchangeable
laws of nature have taken the place of what constituted the
main content of mathematically inspired Greek wisdom, the
. An_ essay published in 1980 as Yom Ideal der praktischen Philosophie
an UmfJmitas JS1 PP 613-6)o. Passages in square brackets are taken from
a longer version of this essay entitled "Problems of Practical Reason,"
also in
1
98o: Probleme der praktischen Vernunft in Sinn und
Klen-Cona Stun t 6
I gar 1 PP 147-15
so


Pythagorean science of the numbers and the stars. It is clear
that on this model, human affairs hold little promise of being
knowable. Morals and politics, the laws that men set up, the
values by which they live, the institutions they create, and the
habits they follow-none of these can lay claim to being un-
changeable or therefore genuinely knowable.
From the point of view of modem science, of course, the an-
cient heritage of scientific thought has been re-established on a
new basis: a new epoch of knowledge of the world began with
Galileo. From that point on, the object of scientific question-
ing has been determined by a new conception of knowability.
This is the concept of method, and its primacy over the subject
matter: the objects of science are defined by the conditions of
methodical knowability. This raises the question of what kind
of science the humaniora {that peculiar comparative that always
makes one ask what the superlative, a truly human science,
would really look like), these sciences of human affairs that we
call the Geisteswissenschaften, could be under these circum-
stances.
To a great extent they obviously follow modem scientific
thinking. But at the same time they carry on the old tradi-
tion of human knowledge that has characterized the history of
Western culture since antiquity. [Even John
Stewart Mill, the famous author of Inductive Logic,
2
a book that
determined how the science that blossomed in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries originally understood itself, used the
ancient name for the Geisteswissenschaften in calling them the
"moral sciences." But for Mill (and I'm not joking) they had
the same scientific status as meteorology: their statements were
thought as reliable as those of long-range weather forecasting.
This is patently extrapolated from a concept of empirical sci-
ence modeled on the success of the modem natural sciences.]
Since then it has become one of the tasks of philosophy to
TIN Ideal of Practirtd Philosophy/ Jl


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. --
uphold the autonomous validity of the uhuman" sciences, the
humaniora.
There used to be no need for this. Rhetoric was the current
of uncontested tradition that bore mans ancient knowledge of
[Th
is sounds a little strange to modem ears, as we think
man.
of "rhetoric" as a pejorative term for irrelevant argument. But
we should restore the true breadth of the concept. It includes
every spoken form of communication and is what holds human
society together. There would be no human society if we could
not speak to and understand one another without resorting to
logical arguments. So it's worth reminding ourselves of the sig-
nificance of rhetoric and its place in modern science.
It's plain that rhetoric in the Greek sense never counted as
science. But it's just as plain that in the eyes of a Greek thinker
historical writings, for example, were not scientific either. They
both belong in the same great domain of speaking and writ-
ing well. When Sextus Empiricus questioned the value of the
sciences in his famous skeptical arguments
3
it certainly never
occurred to him to say a single word about history.] So we have
a new question: how does our civilization-characterized as it
is by science, that is, by modem empirical science-represent
the heritage of ancient rhetoric and the opportunity it offers to
justify and found scientifically the knowledge of man it has be-
queathed to us?
[To demonstrate this fully, I might point out how the his-
torian's ideal changed between the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. It changed from Plutarch, the late Greek author
who presented the eighteenth century with a great drama of
moral h
. experaence m his parallel biographies of great men, t e
Vuae parallelae, to Thucydides,
5
that other great-in a sense
even greater-Greek historian who ranks as the foremost hero
of modern critical history thanks to his critical attitude to
the reports of his contemporaries, his careful scrutiny of eye-
S31Theltka/ of Practual Philosophy
witnesses' prejudices, and especially his almost superhuman
impartiality.
Now my question is how the new critical scientific under-
standing fits in with the old understanding that people develop
for, among and along with other people.] To put this question in
a modem way: what is the epistemological character of the so-
called human sciences? Are they really just inexact sciences that
might compete at best with long-range weather forecasting, or
do they have some privilege that mathematics, the most exact
of all sciences (by which I mean of course that it is the only
science of pure reason), perhaps does not itself possess? The
epistemological problem can also be formulated in terms of the
relationship of fact to theory. As such it is a universal problem:
providing a critical justification of ourselves as men of science.
This problem is not confined to the human sciences. It is
clear that even in the natural sciences, it is theory that really de-
termines and confirms the actual epistemic value of established
facts. The mere accumulation of facts constitutes no experience
at all, let alone the foundation of empirical science. It is the
.,hermeneutic, relationship between fact and theory that is de-
cisive in this field too. [The Vienna School's epistemological
attempts to erect natural science on the basis that observation
statements are indubitably certain because of the direct simul-
taneity of the observer and the observed was already refuted,
decisively I think, by Moritz Schlick in the earliest stages of
the Vienna Circle (193
4
).]
6
Nonetheless, if we concern ourselves only with this "her-
meneutic" critique of facts from the point of view of their
forming theories, we shall only do justice to the human sci-
ences to a minimal degree. For in the end only Max Weber's
grand, though somewhat quixotic, enterprise
7
remains to ex-
tend "value-free science" to knowledge of society. The field
in which the genuine hermeneutic problem
1
presents itself is
The I deal of Prrutical Philosophy I SJ

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wledge of man and of man's knowledge about
that o t e .
himself, not just that of isolating the reciprocal relationship of
theory and fact. . . .
In the late nineteenth century, With the mcreasmg domi
nance of the south-west German school (which Max Weber
followed to a certain extent), the key principle was that the
human sciences could establish themselves on the definition of
a historical fact. It is clear that a historical fact is not simply
a fact and that not everything that happens can be called a
historical fact. What elevates a fact into a historical fact? The
familiar answer is the reference to values: it signifies something
in the course of things that Napoleon caught a cold at the
battle of Wagram (or wherever it was). Not all the colds people
catch are historical facts. So the theory of values was the domi-
nant theory. But there is no science of values. Thus Max Weber
came to the radical conclusion that questions of value ought to
be eliminated from science altogether and that sociology must
look for a new basis.
Now this Neo Kantian philosophy of history was certainly
a slender basis for a theory of values. The romantic heritage
of the German spirit-the heritage of Hegel and of Fried-
rich Schleiermacher that came to be disseminated principally
through Wilhelm Dilthey's efforts to find a hermeneutic foun-
dation for the human sciences-should have proved more in-
fluential. Dilthey's thinking was broader than Neo-Kantian
epistemology, for he took over Hegel's full legacy-the doc-
trine of objective spirit. This doctrine holds that spirit finds its
not only in subjectivity but also in the objectifi-
cation of institutions, systems of behavior, and systems of life
as econo d
.my, JUStice, an society, respectively, and so comes to
be an obJect of possible understanding as uculture."
9
Of course,
Dilthey's tt . . so
a empt to reVIve Schleiermacher's hermeneutiCS
and
50
to base the humaniora on the identity between the
lt
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uy
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Its
ifi-
life
tO
understander and the understood, was doomed to failure inso-
far as history involves a much deeper strangeness and alienness
than what could be seen so confidently from the standpoint of
its intelligibility. [Dilthey's model of historical understanding
is autobiography-the case where someone has lived through
historical events and looks back to interpret what he has seen
with his own eyes; this detail is a characteristic symptom of his
overlooking the "facticity" of events. Autobiography is always
much more like a story of private illusions than the understand-
ing of real historical events.]
On the other hand, the limits of history of ideas, this idealist
or spiritual-historical identification of spirit and history, were
discovered with the change ushered in by the twentieth cen-
tury, for which, I personally believe, Husserl and Heidegger
were decisively responsible. In Husserl's later work the magic
word Lebenswelt (life-world) appears
11
-one of those rare and
wonderful artificial words (it does not appear before Husserl)
that have found their way into the general linguistic conscious-
ness, thus attesting to the fact that they bring an unrecognized
or forgotten truth to language. So the word "Lebenswdt" has
reminded us of the presuppositions that underlie all scientific
knowledge.
Heidegger's program of a "hermeneutics of facricity"
0
(which means confronting the intrinsic incomprehensibility of
factical Dasein) was a complete break with idealist herme-
neutics. Understanding and wanting to understand were rec-
ognized as being in tension with what really happens. Both
Husserl's doctrine of the life-world and Heidegger's concept of
the hermeneutics of facticity stress the temporality and finitude
of man against the unending task of understanding and truth.
Now it is my thesis that this insight shows us that knowl-
edge need not just boil down to the question of how we can
do b r.di
mtnate what 1s other and alien: yet that 1s the astc
1
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----
f h
t'fic
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nvestigation of reality still alive in our natural
0
t e scten 1
. ( haps also because of a last fatth m the rattonality
sctences per . .
of the world). I claim that, on the contrary, tt IS not objec-
tivity ( Ohjtktivital) that is in the sciences,"
but the prior relation to thetr obJects ( Gegtnstande). In this
realm of knowledge I would supplement the ideal of objective
knowledge erected by the ethos of science with the ideal of
participation. The real criterion for whether or not the human
sciences have any content is whether or not they participate in
the essential expressions of human experience formulated in art
and history. In my work I have tried to show that the model
of dialogue is significant because it illuminates the structure of
this form of participation. For dialogue is distinguished by the
fact that no one participant can survey what comes out of it
and then claim that he can master the subject on his own, but
instead that we share together in the truth and in one another.
[I have explained all of this to give credibility to the sig-
nificance of Aristode's practical philosophy and the tradition
it began. In the end it will provide a common ground be-
neath rhetoric and critical thinking, between the traditional
form of man's self-knowledge and modern science's reduction
of everything to alien objectivity.] Aristotle developed practi-
cal philosophy, which includes politics, in express opposition to
the ideal of theory and theoretical philosophy. In doing so he
raised human practice into an independent domain of knowl-
edge. "Praxis" signifies all things practical, including all human
behavior and all the ways people organize themselves in this
world, not least of which is politics and, within that, legisla-
tion. ["Constitution" in the broadest sense, the self-regulation
of the social and political order, is the main problem whose
solution rules and orders human affairs.]
So what is the theoretical status of the desire to know and
reflect about practice and about politics? Aristotle occasionally
s6I TIN Ideal of Practical Philosophy

mentions a threefold division of philosophia into theoretical,
practical and poetical philosophy
13
(within this third group the
famous Poetics has come down to us, and rhetoric, the making
of speeches, belongs to it too). But practice, the object of prac-
tical philosophy, stands between the two extremes of knowing
and doing or creating. Its real basis is clearly mans central
position and distinctive nature, the fact that he leads his own
life not by following instinctive compulsions but with reason.
Thus, the basic virtue that stems from the nature of man is the
rationality ( Vernunftigkeit) that guides his practice.
The Greek expression for this is phronesis. Aristotle asks
how practical rationality is situated between the scientists self-
consciousness and that of the doers, makers, engineers, tech-
nicians, artisans, etc. How is the virtue of rationality situated
alongside and together with the virtue of being scientific and
the virtue of being technically adept? [Even knowing nothing
about Aristotle, one can immediately recognize that this practi-
cal rationality must have a superior position. What would come
of our place in life and our own affairs if the expert reigned
supreme and the technocrat had free rein? Do we not have
to make our own moral and political decisions? But this also
means that the only way we can feel as politically responsible
as when each individual answers for himself is when the deci-
sion is taken by a rational and responsible politician in whom
we place our trust.]
Aristotles practical philosophy depends on this question,
which is personified by Socrates. An account must be given of
what kind of claim this kind of rationality or responsibility has,
and this is what philosophy is about, which means that it de-
mands conceptual endeavor. One has to grasp the reason for the
fact that alongside theory, alongside the all-consuming passion
to know (which has its anthropological basis in the primitive
fact of curiosity) there is another genuinely all-encompassing
Tht ftitlll of Philosophy/ J7



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f
on that consists not in a learnable skill or in blind
use o reas 'bili
_r. but
1
none's rational respons1 ty to oneself.
coruonmsm
One crucial idea runs through both the so-called human sci-
d
"practical philosophy:" in both, the fundamentally
ences an .
finite constitution of man H takes on a dec1sive role with respect
to the infinite task of knowing. This is obviously the essential
way to characterize what we call rationality (Vernilnftigkeit),
or what we mean by someone's being reasonable: that he has
overcome the temptation of dogmatism that goes with all sup-
posed knowledge. So someone can strive for what he wants and
try to bring it about through his actions, but he must always
find his ground in the givens of our finite Dasein. [Aristotle
formulates this by saying that the principle of practical matters
is the "that," the "hoti. "
15
This is no mystical wisdom. In terms
of the philosophy of science, it simply makes explicit that the
underlying principle here is fact.]
How can factuality take on the character of a principle, of
the primary and definitive starting point? Here, "fact" does not
refer to the factuality of a strange fact that one copes with by
learning how to account for it. It is the factuality (Tatsachlich-
hit) of the convictions, values, and habits that we all share with
the deepest inner clarity and the most profound communality,
the quintessence of all that goes to make up our way of life. The
Greek word for this quintessential factuality is the well known
concept of ethos, the being that comes about through practice
and habituation.l' Aristotle is the founder of ethics because
he privileged this factuality as the definitive kind. Phronesis,
answerable rationality, can ensure that this ethos is not mere
indoctrination or accession to custom and has nothing to do
~ t the conformism of a half-guilty conscience (but note that
lt ~ n l y ensures this where people actually possess this ratio-
nality (Vernunftigkeit); it is no gift of nature.) That we come
to know ourselves by exchanging ideas with our fellow men,

sBITht Ideal of Practital Philosophy
h
r
l
n society and in the state, that we come to
living toget e .
by tions and decisions, is certamly not conform-
rnrnon conVlC . . .
he contrary, it constitutes the very digruty of bemg
1SfTl On t [An h " al"
a self and of yone w o 1S noft'dasoc1 d
a1
already accepted others, the exchange o 1 eas an
has ways
ction of a common world of convention.
. '
is somethmg better than the word s contem-
connotations might suggest. It means agreement that
a mere externally prescribed system of rules
but the identity between an individuars consciousness and con-
victions represented in other people's consciousness, between
the various ways we organize our lives. In one sense, this is a
question of rationality, but not just in the sense of pragmatic
and technological reason in which we generally use the word
when we say, "If I want such and such, a rational first step is
to do such and such." That is Max Weber's famous means-
end rationalityP If we want a particular end, we are obliged to
know which means serve this end and which do not. So ethics
is not just a matter of principles. We must also answer for our
knowledge or our lack of it. Knowledge is a part of "ethos." But
rationality, in the great moral and political sense of Aristotelian
phronesis, without doubt goes beyond knowing how to use the
right means for given ends.] In human society, everything de-
pends on how that society sets its goals or, better still, on how it
gets everybody to agree on the goals that they affirm and finds
the right means to achieve them. Now it seems crucially im-
for understanding the desire for theoretical knowledge
m the domain of h . al h . .
uman practtc re t at m every case, pnor
to all theoret' al ' fi
IC JUStl cation, we presuppose a previous com-
nutment to an 'd al f . . . .
[A .
1
e o rat10nahty wuh determmate content.
of SCience with contentful presuppositions! This is the kind
problem in th h'l
sio f . e P
1
osophy of science with which the discus-
n practical h'l h
P I osop y really belongs. Aristotle thought
TIN 1dtal of Prtutita/ Philosophy/ S9

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aid for example, "Before we can learn
about t s w en ' . .
h
. b t practical philosophy or about conce1vmg norms
anyt mg a ou . .
for human behavior or the rational const1tut1on of a state, we
must first be educated and so become capable of rationality."
Here ''theory" presupposes "participation." These are ideas
that Kant also meticulously developed in a quite different con-
text: if we think of rationality as a human moral quality in-
dependent of theoretical capabilities, how can we still tolerate
a theory or philosophy of morals at all? There is a famous
note in Kant's notebooks where he says, "Rousseau has set me
right!" What he means is that he learned from Rousseau that
the perfection of civilization and the zenith of intellectual cul-
ture are no guarantee of progress for human morality. He went
on to build his famous moral philosophy on this deep insight.
Human moral self-justification is a job for morality itself, not
for philosophy. Kant's often invoked "categorical imperative"
was no more than the abstract formulation of what everyone's
"practical" responsibility to himself tells him. It invokes the ac-
knowledgment that no kind of knowledge based on reason can
claim any kind of superiority over the practical autonomy of
our rationality. Practical philosophy itself depends on practical
conditions. Its principle is the "that." In Kantian language this
is called "formalism" in ethics.]
This ideal of practical philosophy is valid for the human sci-
ences, even if they do not realize it. [They are not called the
"moral sciences" for nothing. They illuminate not a particular
domain of objects, but the quintessence of humanity's self-
objectification, our doing and suffering as well as our lasting
creations.] For the practical universality implied by the concept
of rationality (Verniinftigkeit)[(or the lack of it)] comprehends
us all through and through. Thus for theoretical knowledge,
which as such acknowledges no l;mitations, it represents the
supreme authority to which theory is answerable, in both the
6
o1Tht Ideal of Pratlital Philosophy
social and the natural sciences. This is the implication of Aris-
totle's
11
practical philosophy," which he also calls politics. Rea-
son demands the proper application of knowledge and ability1'
-and this application always involves submitting at the same
time to the common ends that apply to us all. The commu-
nality of these ends has begun more and more to encompass
the whole of humanity. If that is the case, then hermeneutics
as the theory of application-that is, of bringing the universal
and the individual together-is in fact a central philosophi-
cal task. Not only does it have to mediate between universal
theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge, it must also see
whether the ends to which we put our abilities measure up to
the common ends that support our own cultutre and that of
humanity in general. Consequendy, hermeneutics holds sway
not only in science but throughout the whole breadth of human
understanding.
Tht ldtal Df Pratti(a/ Phi/ruophy/ 61




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Science and the Public Sphere
The Enlightenment axiom "Dare to make use of your own
son" inaugurated modem scientific culture. Ever since Wilhelm
von Humboldt's reform of university politics,
1
the
of research and teaching has been the hallmark of the German
university. It is the foundation of the new ahsolutum of science.
Since then, scientificity is a value to which
gians as well as lawyers and doctors-gives priority over their
own standards. Since then the whole weight of the unity of
search and teaching is evident in our job titles and the prosaic
distinctions we draw nowadays: the Naturwissenschaftler (natu-
ral scientist) on one side, the Geisteswissenschaftler (human sci-
entist) on the other. These terms often characterize people's
functions in the economy, the administration, the educational
system, and other areas of social life. The researcher, the scien-
tist, is no longer someone allowed by the indulgence of people
in power to administer cultural goods: he has become the ex-
pert. In the age of a third Enlightenment, the appeal to experts
and especially to social experts, and the whole model of apply-
ing the natural sciences to the tasks of modem mass society-
all this has given the absolutum of scientificity a whole new ex-
plosive effect.
We can see the internal interweaving, and we see the state's
mounting dependency on science, which obliges it to take sci-
ence more and more under its own protection and oversight.
And on the other side we have science's mounting dependence
on the modem state. In a thoroughly rationalized political sys-
A lectu M
re gtven an arburg in 1977
tern that leaves no space free of political responsibility, science
insists on maintaining the freedom of theory and research. It
insists on maintaining research, and this in the interests of the
economic system. But everyone knows that in recent decades
the mounting costs of doing so have spurred mounting expec-
tations on the part of the state. And the third thing we see is
an after-effect: worry about our cultural standards, worry about
the public sphere itself, worry about the state. This is where we
see emerging all the problems in the educational system that
have recendy developed precisely out of the state's interest in
preparing us well, from our earliest youth, for professional life,
as well as the problems of universities that have reduced the free
space of research by requiring increased teaching. In this situa-
tion, the conflict between the claim of science and the claim of
society becomes a pressing object for reflection.
The conflict between free research and state power is en-
tirely irresolvable by political means. Political power is obliged
to apply the criterion of purpose in all its decisions. By contrast,
the postulate of the basic sciences is that they are ufree of pur-
pose." It is in a certain sense a necessary pretense when some-
one explains to the public, with its expectations of purpose, that
science sometimes involves asking basic questions from whose
answers no results can be expected that would directly fulfill
any purpose. I call this a lame pretense because, in truth, all
research is basic research, and only through a secondary trans-
formation can it address the problem of applying its findings.
One important point is that whoever exercises power and
bears responsibility in the modem representative state needs to
have this power and activity legitimized by ballot. This com-
pels the politician to make only short-term calculations for four
years at most. Science and research know no such short peri-
~ s of time. There, the beginning, the first spark of a research
Idea, is separated perhaps by decades from anything that might
Srimu and lbl N/i( Sphmi6J



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ty. We need only think of the upsurge of the
be of use to socte
rural sciences the nineteenth century.
na Up until the middle of this century it could justly be said that
h
d
. fir.ty years lived on the great research achieve-
t e prece mg '
1
ments of the nineteenth century, that it was the realization of
the really productive ideas of the late nineteenth century that
finall made the wave of industrialization foam and surge in the
Only with the atomic age, the splitting of the atom
and the energy problems connected with it, has there emerged
something really new in the application of research. In general
there is a conflict between the short-term and the long-term,
and its consequence is necessarily impatience on the part of the
public sphere.
A further conffict that follows directly from this situation is
the necessity of planning research and the near impossibility of
doing so. For it really seems too much to ask that a researcher
fulfill administrative expectations about the legitimacy andre-
liability of his plan. The researcher who impresses me is not
the one who fulfi11s his plans but the one who finds something
different from what he expected. On the other hand, from
the planning perspective it is natural to demand too much of
researchers because in economic, political, and every kind of
practical planning the state depends on a certain reliability in
its planning and the fulfillment of its plans, in order to establish
its budget and its finances and distribute public funds justly.l
The way society and its political forces set about organizing our
is at best a badly functioning accommodation that
lS full of compromise. But research allows no compromise.
It follows that it is almost impossible to control it. This
needs to be said with a certain emphasis.
What is today required of the public sector in balancing the
need and duty to oversee those who receive its money is com-
plete nonsense when it comes to the research sector. The at-
6-1 / Scimet and lht Pu/Jiic Sphtrt
tempt to calculate how many hours a professor should spend
in preparing his lectures and therefore how many hours in the
week he is on duty so that public money can be paid out com-
mensurately to him- the absurdity is palpable. It is not possible
to administer research in this bureaucratic way. That financial
oversight is necessary over the ever greater sums being invested
in many branches of research certainly does have something
convincing about it. But it must be admitted that this over-
sight is only partial. For who can really be in a position to judge
whether the book purchases made by a particular library or fac-
ulty on December 15 of a certain year were as necessary as the
specialists assert? Only those specialists themselves can make
that judgment.
The purchases of the Graeculi are moderate, but in the natu-
ral sciences and medicine we are talking about much higher
sums, and in the end it always remains the case-this is not a
pathetic thing to say, but a simple description of the fact-that
trusting the trustworthy is more effective than any financial
control, which, like every other kind of control, always stays de
facto within determinate limits. There is no doubt that trust
can be abused. Wherever people show trust, the abuse of trust
also occurs. But wherever trust is shown, that trust is also re-
warded. There is a reason for trust between science and society.
I believe there is common anthropological ground beneath the
antagonisms between pragmatism and idealism and between
practice and theory. But we shall certainly not find this ground
if we agree to any false reconciliations.
It is a mistake to proclaim the virtues of making our prac-
tical political reason scientific, as people sometimes do these
days. It is a mistake to make politics too academic, not least
because the social sciences are still in their infancy compared
to the natural sciences and do not have at their disposal a rich
store of centuries of experience, but also because they lack the
Stimu 11nd the Puhli' Sphml6s

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kin o comp
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to expenmen
be made in the natural sciences.
It seems that one of the causes of our present difficulties
is that we have forgotten about our power of judgment.l By
"power of judgment," I mean what is understand-
ing, which generalizes from the expenence of life. So those
who exercise it in their political and social judgment do not
use what has come to them through rules, books, or so-called
teaching, but through experience (Erfahrung).
Let us consider the anthropological foundations of the rela-
tion between theory and practice in human life. Is this relation
really based on two irreconcilably different attitudes to human
reason? Are the passion for theory and the passion for practice
not simultaneously at work on both sides-on those who make
a profession of theory and those whose profession is the prac-
tice of social life? Practice is not the blind application of theo-
retical findings about what it is possible for us to do. Practice,
and politically responsible practice in particular, is imposed on
man because he is not bound by the animal's natural instincts
but is endowed with characteristics that have diverted us from
the contexts and paths of pure naturalness. He is constantly
faced with a choice. He sets himself ends and looks for means.
He uses practical reason. He is familiar with organized work,
which always involves the denial of impulses. Hegel was right
when he said that work is desire held in check.
5
The immediate
satisfaction of impulses is postponed in favor of a commitment
of energy that is recognized as necessary, which also involves a
commitment to social and legal order. This order is inevitable
because in this sense man rationally shapes the conditions of
his lir
own Ie .
. But this already leads to conflict, for none of it is possible
Without people having power over people. This is the problem
66/ Stienu and tht Puhlic SphnY
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of politics. The organization of a state is unthinkable without
people exercising ov_er people, what is so monstrous
about it, the true d1alect1c of power, 1s that every attempt
to control power gives birth to more power, even though the
highly developed modem art of finding a balance of powers-
as in, say, Montesquieu's doctrine of the separation of legisla-
tive and executive
6
-does to some extent bring about a certain
equilibrium and control of power. This is the basic idea of the
modem constitutional state. But we cannot forget that each
controlling power is itself a possible new super-power within
the constitutional order. This is part of the law of power itself.
Now, I believe that theory, the theoretical attitude, is likewise
a fundamental form of human behavior, and that it is in no way
limited to the special case that asks to be exempted from social
expectations, that of science and research. For what is theory?
In the first place, theory involves and is, in my opinion, dis-
tance from oneself. In his great utopia, Plato showed that the
guardians, the people who exercise control over power and thus
hold the real power, can resist the law of constantly extend-
ing and overweening power only if there is something else that
they would rather be doing.' This is the Greeks' idea of the
theoretical life, which 1 do not consider at all out of date and
which has merely been expelled from our conscious reBection
by a certain over-emphasis on practice.
Theory is a basic human possibility, and it is connected most
closely with those other organizations of power over men that
we call the state, politics and pragmatic political action. What
I mean is what Aristotle has already expressed with complete
purity and truth: all men by nature strive after knowledge. The

cunos1ty of a child growing up, the first attempts at cntJc1sm,
accumulating experience, the growing sense of direction, man's
process of settling into the organized world that surrounds
him, his participation in the linguistic communication of all



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with all-this all leads down the path of Bildung (cultivation).
So cultivation is not the privilege of a particular class, and it is
not a privilege that goes :ny tal-
ents: Bildung is, as Hegel satd, the ability also to thmk from
the other person's point of view. What characterizes the culti-
vated person is that he knows something about the particularity
of his own experiences and so realizes the danger in generaliz-
ing which follows from that particularity.
My thesis: theory is just as primordial an anthropological
datum as is practical and political power. So everything de-
pends on constantly renewing the balance between these two
human forces. And I am convinced that human society exists
only because and as long as there is a balance of this kind.
The passion for politics involves an obsession with ends, the
passion for theory involves a freedom from ends. This free-
dom from ends is virtually institutionalized in the sciences:
they are ar/ts libtralts, not ar/ts mtchanicat. These free arts can
also be called schont Kunslt, fine arts, for "schon" (beautiful)
has a much broader meaning than we might suppose from aes-
thetic taste.
The balance between obsession with ends and freedom from
ends pertains to human life as such, however. It is human only
if in our purposive action there is at the same time freedom
from purpose. Whoever is able to achieve distance from him-
self, who gains insight into the limitedness of his sphere of life,
and so openness to others, experiences constant correction by
reality. Science has made this its most noble duty. Its freedom
from ends serves to liberate us from those overly narrow ends
that our wishes and illusions constantly create in us. This is the
famous education to objectivity that makes a researcher.
A researcher's conscience consists in yielding uncondition-
ally to the answer reality gives him, even if it means giving up
years that he has invested in his research, only to find it leads to
6
81 &itntt and lht Pu6/ic Sphtrt
a blind alley. Education to objectivity and science, moreover, is
a goal that can be accepted by society, and this implies that edu-
cation to purpose-free research into truth is really not as odd
as all that. It has nothing to do with the idolization of knowl-
edge and ability. It is an indispensable element of the process of
human "socialization" in which the practitioner, and even the
"administrator," participate just as much as the researcher.
Inevitably, conflicts between the researcher and the admin-
istration keep arising. The institutionalization of free research,
a sine qua non because it needs the millions upon millions
invested in it, ultimately means that whoever allocates this
money must answer for it, and so must justify its applicability.
This demand can scarcely be realized without insoluble con-
flicts, bitterness, and exaggeration arising on both sides, with
misconceptions all along the line. How is it possible to avoid
bureaucratization and the dominance of a bureaucratic appara-
tus, so as to be critical of the particularity even of one's own
administrative and political competence? For this there is no
better way than the one Plato lays down for his guardian who
would rather be doing something else than the task to which he
is appointed. Someone who finds nothing more beautiful than
power-and power must seem attractive if it is to be used effec-
tively-will surely not be able to find that distance from himself
and his power that would make a liberal use of his power pos-
sible. Liberalization of the way we treat scientific institutions
and their possibilities seems to be bound up with the growing
realization that what is beautiful, what is free from ends, is a
self-fulfillment of humanity that is legitimate and needs no jus-
tification, and so is not a question of administrative techniques.
Wherever administration functions, this insight will exist. But
the public consciousness should really be informed of what,
from its point of view, this really comes down to.
The problem that gives us so many headaches in rationalized
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industrial society is, at bottom, a very old one. Modern sci-
entinc activity can lead to the same misreadings and the same
corrections of these misreadings as was already the case for the
creators of Western scientinc culture, the Greeks. Thales of
Miletus (6
24
-544 s.c.), the founder of ancient philosophy, told
the story of how he fell into a well on his way home and a maid
had to help him out of it.
10
This anecdote was collected in a
time when people thought the same thing about pure scholars
as in many circles is still the case today. The point of the story
is that Thales had climbed into the well to observe the stars
,
for the well was an ancient "telescope.'' That is how easy it is
to be deceived about what a researcher is doing out of a passion
for theory.
I

70 I Stitntt lint/ tht Puhlit Sphm
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6
Science as an Instrument of
Enlightenment
In his treatise on the question "What is Enlightenment?" Im-
manuel Kant gives his famous answer: "Sapere aude-have the
courage to make use of your own understanding:'
1
It seems a
simple slogan- and yet it suggests something that unmistak-
ably characterizes the spirit of modernity. For why should it re-
quire courage? What danger is threatening here? Now, making
mistakes is certainly a universal danger for the human mind,
and this is related to the fact that standing alone in one's opin-
ion is oppressive-so much so that a person can come to feel as
if he has been ostracized from the common faith, whereas on
the other hand what he himself holds true seems so evident to
him that he may clamor for it to be generally recognized.
It is in the critique of religion that we can see the real sig-
nificance of defining the essence of enlightenment as having
the courage to think differently in the face of all the domi-
nant prejudices. In historical retrospect, we tend to describe the
times when religion is criticized as times of enlightenment, and
we distinguish a first and a second Enlightenment. The first
Enlightenment took place in Greece, when the view of life en-
shrined in the epics and myths of Homer and Hesiod was dis-
solved by the new passion for discovery. In this sense the entire
history of Greek thought stretching from Pythagoras to Hel-
lenistic science is an age of enlightenment. Similarly, one can

. A paper presented at the conclusion of a symposium on the history of
caence in Wolfcnbuttel, a
9
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think of the modem Enlightenment as including the whole,
Ion development that began with the Copernican revolution
. g mv as a result of which the biblical view of life based
m astrono J'
on the story of creation had to be given up. Kepler, one of the
great followers of Copernicus, had a slogan that expresses the
moral force of this Enlightenment: "One has to have an open
mind to be able to recognize the truth." It is a slogan that
remained valid for Newton's time, and even for the spirit of
present-day research.
Clearly both of these enlightenments have an especially close
connection with science. But what was science for the Greeks,
and what is it for modernity? Even the word the Greeks used
for it, mathemala, indicates the paradigmatic role of mathemat-
ics. Plato stuck to this model so radically that he even saw the
true science of the heavens, true astronomy, as consisting not
in observing the actual positions and movements of the stars,
but in pure mathematical and numerical relationships. And if
in the end even nature came to be thought of as approximat-
ing these pure relationships of numbers and measurements, and
if this approximation bestowed the character of science on, for
example, medicine, it was still always compulsory assumptions
and their consequences, the logic of proof, apodeixis (which is
most purely embodied in mathematics), that constituted sci-
ence.
On the other hand, though modern science is certainly also
familiar with the dominance of the instrumentarium of mathe-
matics, what distinguishes it from the sciences of pure reason-
philosophy, metaphysics, and above all mathemat-
Ics-is that modern sciences understand themselves as sciences
of experience. The logic of their procedure is called induction.
A concept like "science of experience" would have sounded
like "w d " fi 00
en tron to Greek ears. Science requires no ur-
ther experience. Yet in one respect the science that the Greeks
'PI Stitnu as an lnsiTUmnt/ Df Enlighltnmtnl
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.
....
established and that has determined all occidental culture is
intimately allied with that of modernity: science exists and is
important for no other reason than because it is "beautiful."
But the beautiful is such that it is pleasing of itself and per-
mits no disputing about why it is beautiful and pleasing. Thus
broadly conceived, the beautiful (kalon in Greek) pertains to all
theoretical science. It is the joy of theory, the joy of discovering
the truth, that science lays claim to.
Certainly there is also a narrower sense of "Enlightenment";
this has been used to conceptualize a historical period, the eigh-
teenth century, and was used so even then. The Enlightenment
is tied to the critique of religion, and if it goes under the ban-
ner of science, then that implies the pragmatic relationship of
science to human happiness, health, welfare, and freedom from
suffering and misery. It promises a different kind of help from
the consolation offered by the church. The feeling of the mod-
ern Enlightenment also corresponds to something in the first
age of Enlightenment. The art of speaking and argumentation
was disseminated as a universal means of achieving political
and practical success, and so it is no accident that leaders of
Greek sophistic, such as Protagoras and Gorgias, with their
pragmatic relativism, encouraged skepticism and doubt about
all science. Here a distinction between the first and the second
Enlightenment appears with respect to the narrower concept of
Enlightenment as well. The modern one appeals wholly to sci-
ence, whereas in the end the ancient one finally turned against

sctence.
This distinction is also manifested in their different attitudes
toward religion. The first, Greek, Enlightenment differed
50
much from the modem one that metaphysics, as part and par-
~ l of the development of Greek science, was to result from it
10
the form of rational theology (a metaphysics that remained
valid for two thousand years). Ultimatdy, this first Enlighten-
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d t
he way for acceptance of a new religion, the world
ment pave .
religion of Christianity. In the modern .Enlightenment the role
of science has been quite different, wh1ch leads us to ask what
science does signify for the modern Enlightenment. In asking
th
. I am thinking of the Enlightenments of both the eigh-
IS,
teenth century and the twentieth. This is no misprint-it is
a quite deliberate juxtaposition. Certainly if we speak of the
Enlightenments of the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries,
these are not two mutually independent developments. Science
acknowledges only a constant progress. Yet we are entitled to
speak of the Enlightenment of the twentieth century as some-
thing new. It was a tremendous upheaval, and it first achieved
intellectual self-consciousness with the rise of Romanticism.
Yet, however dizzyingly high were the expectations raised by
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment's faith in reason, the
French Revolution's great achievement, the emancipation of
the third estate, signified less of a triumph of the Enlight-
enment than its spokesmen thought it did. It was, all in all,
the beginning of the re-Chri'stianizing of Europe. Who would
have thought it possible at the end of the eighteenth century
that a Vatican council would receive the church's unanimous
approval of the edict proclaiming the pope's infallibility? Thus
in many respects the nineteenth century was to become some-
thing very different from what might have been expected from
the ideals of the Enlightenment. Instead of the equality of all, a
real class society now came to be formed, in that "society" was
distinguished from the proletariat. The countries of Europe
developed into national democracies, some faster than others,
despite the universality of the faith in reason. Vo/kswirtschaft,
national economy, is a word that bears witness to the develop
ment that ultimately erupted so explosively in the period of the
world wars.
And what of today? The episode is at an end. We are now
IS.
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living in an age that is eliminating the retarding influences of
the nineteenth century and laying aside all its taboos. All natu-
ral relationships have been fundamentally altered by the tech-
nical age's fahh in science. Science governs through the society
of experts. It is behind the global industrialization brought
about by the world economy, it is behind the "electronic war,"
and Christianity has come to an end now that its secular-
ized forms have suppressed the nihilism whose rise Nietzsche
50
clear-sightedly prophesied.
2
But thls third Enlightenment's
faith in science is dogged by nagging doubts about the future
of mankind. This can and must give rise to reflection about
the history of science. And so we ask how the second and the
third Enlightenments have distinctive relationships to science.
This way of asking the question is obviously rooted in the soil
of the Enlightenment and takes the point of view of science
in inquiring about the differences between the two epochs. But
differences presuppose limits and so we must ask at the same
time about the limits that have shaped the enlightenment im-
pulse in each epoch.
Here we will be little concerned with the eighteenth century,
known as the classical century of Enlightenment. It is cer-
tainly true that in that century the Enlightenment first became
a public force; in the eighteenth century, too, the organized
forms of science that institutionalized the public awareness of
science first displaced the great pioneers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries who, as individuals, cleared the way for
the new science. And it is true that the Enlightenment thereby
first became a social factor.
Yet the epoch-making decisions had already taken place.
When and how did modernity begin? With the Renaissance?
That is, with humanism's re-awakening of antiquity? With the
discovery of the individual Uacob Burckhardt)/ with the dis-
covery of America? Whenever it started, it was certainly the
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ce that for all its connections with ancient science
new scten , ,
became something quite new and ushered in the new epoch.
One can evaluate the various factors that led to this histori-
cal novelty very differently, and it remains an essential insight
that if the concept of science changed fundamentally during
this period, then this also had a theological basis. It is right to
speak of the nominalistic background of the new science and
of the way its theological grounding in the re-evaluation of,
and over-emphasis on, God's omnipotence overshadowed both
of the other classical predicates of God, his omniscience and
his all-lovingness. The incomprehensible will of God prevents
human reason from trying to penetrate God's thoughts. It has
to be content with what is accessible to its own observations
and its own relative knowledge and means of measurement.
Thus the new science brings with it the break-up of the lin-
guistic view of the world in which the tradition used to live,
for it applied the new language of mathematics to observation.
So it was not new observations or progress in experience of the
world, but rather a new projection of what it means to know
that impelled the new science. Galileo, the creator of classical
mechanics, had the clearest awareness of this, and it was actu-
ally not a sharpening of his observations but an imaginative
wager that led him to discover the mathematically formulable
axioms of mechanics. He was aware of this himself, and clothed
it in the formula "mente concipio," not allowing himself to
be discouraged by the fact that the law of falling he discov-
ered did not correspond to any observable instances of falling,
because emptiness, a vacuum, had not yet been produced any-
where. Galileo's founding of mechanics altogether excluded
final causes from research into nature. He explained the pro-
cesses of nature in terms of causal factors and their interplay,
and this step enabled a new domination of natural processes.
We call this domination "technology." But this technology is
6/S,.
7 (ftntt Ill an lnstrummt of Enlightmmmt
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not a mere secondary consequence of the new knowledge of
nature, or only of its technical presuppositions-it just transfers
this knowledge into the practical realm, allowing us to calcu-
late how we should intervene into initial conditions by making


their effects calculable.
A new claim about what makes science science was here
I

realized in an exemplary way. Descartes found the decisive new


1
conceptualization for it. He gave the concept of method a new,
I

dominant position. Method is, to be sure, an ancient Greek
I
concept, and the Greek concept of method also meant ap-
.

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proaching the thing to be known in a way appropriate to it. But l
the Greek concept of method took the criterion of its appro-

priateness from the individual character of the subject under
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consideration in each case. It was in opposition to this that

,,
Descartes developed the idea of a standard method- the idea


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of a universal method of verification, and so of avoiding error,
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which was supposed to succeed as long as the formal condi-
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tions of methodical procedure were met." It is indicative of the
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tension between the new science and both the traditional form
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of knowledge and our practical orientation within the world



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that modern thought saw its task as thoughtfully integrating
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the two modes of knowledge. Descartes did not publish his
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Discourse on Method as an independent project of the new me-
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thodical thinking, but rather sought a compromise with the
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metaphysical tradition. The title of his most famous work dis-

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plays this attempt at compromise: Meditationes de prima phi-
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losophia-that is, on metaphysics.

It is certainly characteristic of the modern Enlightenment


at lts outset that Descartes should have discovered the sure
foundation of self-consciousness-whose apodictic certainty he
took to be the paradigm of all evident knowledge-by way of
everything.
5
But it is no less characteristic of its be-
&Inning that this self-consciousness acquires legitimacy only
I
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Scitntt as an /nstrumtnl of Enlighttnmtnl /77
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from a roundabout appeal to the awareness of God that it
itself contains. Thus this new and hard-won beginning was at
the same time the beginning of the irresolvable confusion of
modem thinking. It opened up three aporias. The first is the
aporia of two substances. Extension and self-consciousness do
not seem to belong to the same order of being at all. The sec
ond aporia follows from the first: the unsolvable problem of
living things. The concept of extended bodies is insufficient for
thinking about things that are actually alive. But the concept of
self-conscious mind is also not applicable to living things that
do not possess self-consciousness, so Descartes takes animals
to be rather pitiful machines.
6
It was Kant who first integrated
the two perspectives on living things by providing a philosophi
cal grounding for and justification of the tension between the
physical-causal and the morphological-final sciences of life.'
His "solution" has governed our knowledge about living things

ever smce.
The third and most difficult aporia, whose resolution in the
eighteenth century can once again be accredited to Kant but
which fatefully came to a head once more in the twentieth cen-
tury, is the aporia of practical philosophy. The new concept of
science is that of research. But research, as a never-ending em-
pirical science, as an infinite process, must come into conflict
with the present moment's practical need to know. In his so-
called provisional ethics, Descartes himself had excluded ethics
from the new science's claim to universality.
9
This new science
neither can be nor wants to be the complete whole of knowl-
edge in the sense that the older tradition was and so how can
. ,
lt serve the need for practical certainty of life and the practical
knowledge of action? A science understood as research must
necessarily leave practical reason in the lurch.
Kant's response to this aporia rests on our sublime self-
certainty about our moral freedom. Certainly we cannot under-
78/&ientt IU 11n Instrummt of Enlighttnmenl

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stand theoretically how freedom is really possible because the
whole of nature can be conceived only as a mesh of causal rela-
tions. But Kant saw that our practical reason requires that we

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act in self-consciousness of our freedom, that is, with an aware-
ness of our responsibility, even if no theoretical solution to the

I
aporia is possible. Kant's formula for the Enlightenment, "have
the courage to make use of your own understanding," applies

just as much to practical reason as it does to theoretical reason.
For practical reason is not technical reason. It cannot submit
to any received rules of behavior but must acknowledge what is
unconditionally demanded, and cannot rest satisfied with what

is expedient under particular circumstances.

If we view the ever-widening movement of Enlightenment

.
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in the second half of our century against this backdrop, what

seems to be new is that technical thinking is beginning to ex-
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pand into a universal view of the world. As the moral and reli-
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gious basis of Kant's idea of freedom has vanished by degrees
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from present-day consciousness, man's self-consciousness has
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come to rest ever more exclusively on his ability to do and to
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make things. Our self-consciousness projects itself toward the

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technological dream and the emancipatory utopia.
10
So we can ~

ask Kant's question anew-what does "enlightenment" mean


or what could it bring about in this situation? Here we re-
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call another Kantian description of the Enlightenment: it is

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mankind's outgrowing an immaturity for which it was itself to


.

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blame. In what way is mankind shamefully immature today,

and what do we still need to enlighten oursdves about? It is

hardly as though there were still blind faith in authority or an
over-dominant priesthood in modern industrial society. I think
it is our prepossession with the technological dream and our

o ~ s s s i o n with emancipatory utopia that represent the preju-
dices of our time and from which reflection, as the courage to
thi k
n needs to free us.
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The technological dream bedazzles us when ucan do" be-
comes umust do." The emancipatory utopia, for its part, is be-
ginning to look more and ~ o r e like t ~ e trauma of a freedomless
world-bureaucracy. Histoncal reflect1on can lay bare the pre-
suppositions that lie behind these prejudices. And it is reflec-
tion on the history of science that can enlighten us here. Both
presuppositions, that of a perfect ability to make and that of a
perfect ability to administer, correspond to the model of me-
chanics. The new tool of all tools-to recall Aristotle's famous
remark that the hand is the tool of all tools
11
- is machine tech-
nology. This is the extended arm of man who, with the help
of machines, can broaden his sphere of influence boundlessly.
The historical scientific model of mechanics, always capable of
calculating new effects and so bringing about new alterations,
corresponds to a world of unlimited possibilities.
Today once again science promises enlightenment. For sci-
ence tells us with increasing clarity that the world we live in is a
world of limited possibilities. Our world is at an end if it keeps
going on in this way, as if it were always about to umove for-
ward." Science tells us that if we continue as we are doing, this
end will befall us just as surely, even though the precise time
cannot yet be exactly calculated, as if it had been predicted that
the earth were going to collide with a star. This is especially
what we learn from modern biology and everything known
today as the problem of ecology. The population growth that
seems to elude all control, the problems of food and water, en-
vironmental pollution, and especially the problem of energy all
leave us in no doubt that the model of mechanics, with its end-
lessly outstretched arm, is founded on illusions. Today we have
~ o t h e r scientific model that is more appropriate to the actual
Situation of humanity, the biological model of a self-regulated
organism. This is the principle of regulatory feedback, which
modern cybernetics has begun to clarify for us. To think of
8oi StU11lt as an Instrumtnl of Enlightenment
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cybernetics just another of the of humanity,
enlarging still further our ability to make thmgs, amounts,
1
think, to retaining an outdated and fatal form of thought. In
fact, cybernetics offers more than a new technological possi-
bility for further automation-it is a new world-schema, and
the insights it brings present mankind with the task of engag-
ing in critical self-reflection about our ability to make things.
The question is not what can possibly be made but what can
be made in such a way that it does not in the process destroy
things that would otherwise be able to maintain themselves.
The fundamental equilibrium of things must govern our think-
ing if we are to burn out the hydra of machines that constantly
make new machines both necessary and possible.
It certainly seems paradoxical to want to make something
that can maintain itself. That seems precisely to rule out all
human efforts at creation. But we do possess an age-old ex-
ample of this paradox: in medicine. Medicine does not pro-
duce anything, but it is always a restoration of equilibrium, its
knowledge often surprised by new experience and its ability
often outstripped by nature.u What can this example of con-
structive activity teach us? How can it contribute to our scien-
tific understanding of the human situation today? What needs
to be restored if we want to survive? Well, surely nothing but
the consciousness of our real situation in the world. What we
really have to do is alter our consciousness. The world must be
known as something other than just as a world of unlimited
possibilities. Science and the knowledge it provides encourage
man more than ever before to think of himself as a steward of
the eanh, as someone who has to look after the place where he
lives and works. This is the message modern science sends us,
it loses no credibility or urgency by the fact that it concurs
With the li h I
re g1ous message of creatton t eo ogy.
The restoration of this kind of consciousness certainly seems
Scitnu as tan InstrurMnl of Enlighttnmmt/81









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to take us down a long and far-stretching path. So in the end
we might consider doubting whether we can go down this path
all
I
can see three objections that confront us: awareness
at .
of our predicament turns up first of all in the countries whose
escalating industrial development forewarns us about the con-
sequences of the path we are on. For countries with under-
developed industry and civilization, however, this doubt about
technological perfectibility fails to carry much weight, even if
it manages to enlighten the social conscience of the industrial
states and suggest political solutions. But what is involved here
is a problem of humanity as a whole. That is so obvious that it
makes an appeal to the consciousness of all as a common con-

SCJOUSness.
The second question, though, is whether time is not against
us, in other words, whether it is not too late or would take too
long to cultivate this collective consciousness. Here, however,
it is important not to abandon ourselves to the illusions based
on technical calculations about what it is possible for us to do
that now threaten to tum negative: isn't it finally too late? Is
the human race itself going to ruin? But who wants to be able
to know or to calculate that? Again I think that medicine is a
truer model. Doctor and patient here stand for humanity itself,
and their two virtues of hope and patience are not false con-
fidence and idle acceptance-on the contrary, they both allow
for rational activity.
The third and perhaps the most serious objection lies in a
human consciousness enamored of its ability to make things.
Technological civilization puts a premium on the peculiar vir-
t u ~ of flexibility, adaptation, and fitting-in. The ideal of man-
agmg the world through technology still forms man in its image
and makes him into a technical administrator who adequately
fulfills his prescribed function without worrying about other
people. This more than anywhere else, I think, is the bottleneck
8J/ Sdtntt tU an lnstrumml of Enlighltnmml


in our civilization, and this, more than anything else, calls for
nlightenment. But enlightenment is still what it always was:
~ depends on judgment, on thinking for oneself and on culti-
vating these powers. So the present-day sense of the Kantian
slogan of the Enlightenment, "Sapere aude-have the courage
to make use of your own understanding," can be stated in a
new way as the appeal to our social reason to awake from its
technological dream.

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The Idea of Tolerance 1782-1982
In
17
s
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, Kaiser Joseph II issued the so-called "Toleranzpatent,"
a keystone in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Consider
the significance of this event. It is the late eighteenth century.
The Enlightenment has achieved conclusive victory. Even the
rulers of this time, which we call the age of absolutism, are in-
creasingly becoming enlightened despots.
The first representative of the Enlightenment on a European
throne was the much-admired Friedrich II of Prussia. Other
young monarchs, such as Catherine the Great in particular and
also Joseph II and his successor Leopold II, followed Fried-
rich's widely admired example. In reading Goethe we see that
even the son of a free imperial city who was never in the service
of Prussia admired the Prussian king from his youth onward.
It made a huge sensation when, in 1782, the Enlightenment
movement broke through even into Catholic Austria and the
capital city of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.
We possess a small fragment of prose-"Der Hausball" -that
Goethe presented to the Weimar court in the year 1783, por-
traying, in the style of a genre piece, the customs and morals
of Vienna. It begins with an almost hymn-like portrayal of the
anticipation with which the Vienna of that time welcomed the
sunrise of Joseph Il's reign from the foggy seas of the past.t
The edict of tolerance publicly proclaimed the fruit that had
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paper gtven at the International Conference on Tolerance, Vienna,
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ripened out of the Catholic Enlightenment and had slowly and
. sistibly spread into the Habsburg countries.
irft What was this Enlightenment?" We are faced with anum-
ber of different aspects of this phenomenon of the European


Enlightenment. In particular, we must distinguish between
the religious and the socio-political aspects of this movement.
I
What gives this particular Enlightenment movement its edge
and distinguishes it, for example, from the enlightenment that

j .
had led to the development of science in ancient Greece, is,

first and foremost, that it is intimately concerned with the



problem of religion, and of Christianity in particular. Natural
reason must all along have found itself challenged in the ex-
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treme by Christianity's claims of revelation. God's becoming
man and the mystery of the Trinity exceed its grasp; no ratio-

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nal theology can want to incorporate the things that the gospel

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reserves to faith. The development of modern natural science

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greatly aggravates this tension. I remember that when I was a
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child my father, who was a renowned natural scientist, simply
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could not brook the doctrine of the transubstantiation,
2
even
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though he was otherwise tolerant. It went against his scientific
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conscience. The same was always the case with the critique of
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miracles. The new methodical and scientific self-consciousness
was able to accommodate this side of the biblical tradition to
an extent only by complicated cultural-historical or psycho-
logical explanations, as the example of Spinoza shows.
3
On the
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other hand the church claimed to offer an absolutely exclusive
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path to salvation. The Christian command to missionarize was l
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fundamentally absolute in that it branded those belonging to
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other religious confessions as infidels. Within European his- I
tory this refers especially to the life and death struggle that
the Christian West carried on against Islam, to which the city
of Vienna bears glorious witness. Correlatively, on the other
The Idea ofToleranct J782-r9b18J

.d h J sh community was ghettoized. As representative
st e, t e ewt
of the self-understanding of European statecraft, the Church
exercised enormous influence, even after the Reformation_
in the very name of the Counter-Reformation-against both
Islam and Judaism, despite the schism of Christianity into two
fonns of faith. We can get some conception of this by think-
ing of Gotthold Lessing's Nathan the Wise. We recall how long
he hesitated in finishing his favorite work and publishing it, his
conviction (which turned out to be right) that it would create a
powerful disruption, and the actual reaction that the work pro-
voked. Nathan the Wise appeared in 1779 and drove its author
into a frightful new isolation. To be sure, it was first performed
in Friedrich's liberal Berlin in the year 1783, but even in the
age of Josephinism a performance anywhere else, least of all
Vienna, would have been unthinkable.
Beyond its involvement in the history of religion and of the
church, the Enlightenment signified a social movement dedi-
cated to the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie. With the
development of modem economics and science, an old tradition
of municipal freedoms came into play that limited the abso-
lutist claim of the worldly authorities, the kings and princes.
Recently, Hermann Lubbe has rightly pointed out that the
self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie was firmly grounded in
the concept of industria, that is, of the flow of trade and its cre-
ations such as the machine halls and offices.
5
Even if, in the age
of absolutism, the bourgeoisie understood itself and its free-
doms only in a thoroughly negative manner and rejected any
claim to rule, the ideal of bourgeois freedom necessarily had to
solidify into a political claim. Even in the setting of the mod-
em territorial state, the bourgeoisie, with its value-producing
labor, could not in the long run renounce its claim to share in
the political exercise of government. This is called the eman-
cipation of the bourgeoisie," which brought the third estate to
~

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uality in the outbreak of the French Revolution and gave rise
I
eq "'il'h" h
to the slogan c1v ng ts, or rat er umversal human rights.
We might mention a few further pieces documenting the gen-

eral consciousness.
This is much the situation with Friedrich von Schiller's trag-
edy Don Carlos, which, during the very years of the Josephinian

Enlightenment, gave a new political and social significance to
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a traditional dynastic family drama:
6
the introduction of the
Marquis of Posa into Schiller's fiction lent a new and captivat-
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ingly eloquent voice to the rising bourgeoisie, its Bow of trade,

and its political potential. In the young Schiller's poetic imagi-
nation even the Spanish king, who represents the quintessence

of absolutism and is furthermore portrayed as being stricdy
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ruled by the church, can breathe the new air of freedom and
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falter for a moment.

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rationally based holy bond and religiously transfigured it in The
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here a human emotion is expressed that, at least
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within the compass of a magical play, has left all ecclesiastical
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and worldly dominion behind it. Its equivalent in the realm of

ideas is Kant's foundation of religion, which he expressly said . :

was "within the limits of reason alone."' Kant's foundation



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of "practical reason," which he radically disconnected from all
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eudemonistic perspectives {even understood as the Christian
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promise), signified a milestone in the ideological emancipation '

~
of the bourgeoisie that preceded their political emancipation in
~ e revolution. An interesting but not widely known fact might I
illustrate this matter further and especially throw some light on
!
the history of influence
9
that the edict of tolerance has had: in
I
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the
1
79S a four-volume translation of Kant's works into Larin

appeared in the court of the Austrian monarchy, plainly pro-
duced for them; this is a symbol of the willingness and readiness
of the Catholic Enlightenment to reconcile the new thinking
The Idea ofTolmtrrre r;b-19lbla,
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with the sanctified tradition of metaphysics and the authority
of the Christian church.
This defined the place that the edict of tolerance was to
occupy
200
years ago. What the to which it
belongs is the state Christian religton, whtch m the Habsburg
countries was Catholicism, because of the principle "cuius regio
eius religio.uso The edict of tolerance is a political measure sig-
nifying a softening of hardened fronts with a view toward the
toleration and liberation of divergent religious denominations.
This religious tolerance evidently presupposes that the system
of government and the Christianity of society go unchallenged.
Tolerance is an expression of strength, not of weakness. It does
not mean recognizing the equal rights of those who think dif-
ferently. What is tolerated is confined to the sphere of private
mental life and extends at most to the practice of an individual's
own worship. If the enlightened King of Prussia had offered a
formulation for his act of shrewd statesmanship, it might have
run: "Here everyone can go to heaven after his own fashion."
This was not exactly an expression of religious devotion, but of
the strength of the state's new awareness that it could afford to
relax its control. Today the state knows that it owes its executive
power to religious tolerance and the civil right to freedom, and
this stems from the unbroken heritage of the Enlightenment.
We can now describe the situation in 1982, by considering
the broadening horizon within which our political and human

consctousness must move. We must again start from the as-
sumption that a new wave of enlightenment is raging, this time
over more or less the whole of mankind: the scientific domina-
tion of nature and the transformation of our natural environ-
ment is changing the face of the earth and impelling us toward
a rational construction of our social world. The world-wide
universality of this enlightenment effects a massive change in

Cntena m two respects.
88/The ltka ofToltraNt
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On the one side there is religion: it is now no longer limited
to the sphere of the tradition but has entered into a
0
whole new field of tenston. Not only does it now have to do
with the world religions' dialogue with each other; they must
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all come to grips with atheism as well. For the first time in
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human history, forms of political organization have developed
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in which atheism represents the state religion in the same way
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that Christianity was the state religion of Europe for hundreds
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of them must certainly continue to hold that its own doctrine
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yet scientific atheism and its political organization represent a
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tween the denominations. On the other side, the alteration in
0 world-wide criteria has meant that Christianity has necessarily
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lost its absolute standing in humanity's great conversation with
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itself. We do not know how other cultures whose religious tra-
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ditions are different from ours will raise their voices in this

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conversation. The world's religions are necessarily discovering
n
that they have something in common of which they had not
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hitherto been aware and which points far beyond anything

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that has come to light in previous attempts at dialogue. There
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has already been one epoch-that is, the eighteenth century-
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that was prepared to recognize Chinese wisdom as a particular

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n Utton to the rational religion of mankin tm ar Y
10
e the di
runeteenth the Romantics attempted to seem
10
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India d ' f Ch
n Wts om a heightened and enriched fonn o nsuan re-
demption. These were fruits of the modem Enlightenment. But
we must admit that something like the mystery of the 1i . .
~
which is central to the history of our own faith and thinkin '
. bl fi I 1 g,
seems qwte mconce1va e rom, say, an s am1c point of vi
ew.
Christianity's claims to be absolute, or for that matter the truth
claims of any religion, no longer go uncontested. We ask our-
selves whether the idea of tolerance formed within enlightened
Christian countries is sufficient to stand against hardened ideo-
logical positions that have developed in the struggle to domi-
nate the earth. What can tolerance mean when nobody, perhaps
not even the religion of atheism, is so sure of his ground that he
can rationally establish his own claim, in the way that the Euro-
pean Christian state society was sure of itself centuries ago?
And how does this look from a socio-political point of view?
The emancipation of the bourgeoisie, which may be considered
complete in the modem democracies, has led as it were to the
self-dissolution of the bourgeoisie. Its counterpart, the class-
less society, proclaimed to be the creation of the workers and
the peasants, has something abstract about it in comparison to
the uniform appearance of today's industrial society, which has
shaped the face of the advanced industrial nations and drawn
their features everywhere, even if they often seem to be drawn
only as a mask behind which there lurks an unknown face.
This situation has given the concept of tolerance a new profile.
Thus, I think it significant that the problem of rdigious toler-
ance now seems to he the last problem we should worry about
rather than the first; it is an accurate reflection of the conditions
within which we now operate that we should instead pay spe-
cial attention to the role of economics. 1 ask myself: what can
tolerance mean under such altered circumstances? What are we
so certain of that we can or should practice tolerance-or do we
have to say that anything whose life is not ruled by hard dollars
exists at all thanks only to tolerance? Like culture, for example?
This inquiry brings us to the topic: tolerance and the prob-

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lem of the generations. Everybody knows at once what we are
talking about here. What is not quite so certain is who we are
supposed to be urging to be tolerant in our reflections about the
value of tolerance. The older generation? Parents? The changes
pervading our social world have taken on such a breathtaking
pace that the basic presupposition of all tolerance-namely, our
being ruled by self-evident common convictions that shape our
social life-is precisely what is really missing. Neither the older
nor the younger generation, which is bewildered by its need
for orientation, seems to fit the pattern within which the con-
B.ict of generations has always been played out. What has be-
come today of the definitive authority of the older generation,
which formerly could behave tolerantly or intolerantly toward
its juniors, and how can the succeeding generation focus its
drive toward emancipation when it finds that everything is al-
lowed and everything is accessible? What drives young people
to intolerance is not certainty about their new values but a mys-
terious lack of orientation.
The wave of industrialization and bureaucratization sweep-
ing over us has dissolved once self-evidently binding traditions
into untested arbitrariness. This happens in the name of the
"freedom that I love." But what does this freedom look like?
Let's take an example: the feeling of freedom that, especially
for young people, comes from having their own car is coupled
with an enormous dependency, and leads to both a leveling and
an isolation unknown to travelers of earlier times. People do
certainly gather together in front of the television screen, which
deceptively poses as a freely available and ubiquitous source of
information that is common to everybody. But in fact it sig-
nifies the end of conversation,
11
the extreme isolation of each
individual, and therefore the enormous loss of freedom that re-
sults from our inevitable dependence on media politics. In the
same way, the freedom of the new unconventionality that per-
J-......_____ _ __ / ~ '+- , -------

-w..._
-
vades our whole social life-especially that of the young-is
coupled in a peculiar way with a feeling of helplessness and
impotence. The source of this impotence is no longer other
people, those who control and dominate us, but the "system."
This obviously refers to the immanent lawfulness of the eco-
nomic and technical processes that are the real dominant figures
of our day. It is largely independent of the various democratic
and totalitarian political systems on which our states are orga-
nized. The ideologization of the political fronts cannot obscure
this fact. Intolerance displays its weakness. One can certainly
say that the
11
system" of modern industrial society and its uni-
versal dominion over the administered world has developed
from the same motives that gave victory to the idea of religious
and spiritual tolerance in the Enlightenment. But it is precisely
the universality with which the Enlightenment has triumphed
that endangers its own offspring, tolerance. There is something
dictatorial about the ideal of scientific rationality (Rationalitat)
that it is imprudent to disobey. Typically, when this ideal is put
into practice in social reality, it is known as "rationalization."
How changed is the tone of this word, whose noble derivation
from ratio, from reason, is plain for all to see!
tion" suggests transforming the environment into a controllable
organization based on a rational planning, rational methodi-
cality, and rational efficiency that is all-embracing and total.
To fail in this seems to be unpardonable negligence. We know
from the totalitarian political systems of our time-as we do
from similar ancient states (before the Christian church limited
the state's omnipotence)-that no totalitarianism is conducive
to tolerance.
This is what Schiller was talking about through the mouth
of the Marquis of Posa, when he talked of furthering freedom
of thought- the universal conformism that knows no consid-
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ered decision but only accommodation to those in power and
their supposed or actual opinions. What gives state power its
total presence is not so much its external pressure as the inner
reaction it produces. Pragmatism, conformism, and the reward-
ing of adaptability (as Schiller saw) become victorious over the
cultivation of individual judgment and original imagination.
That is the real "terror" that comes from power. Anyone who
has survived the time of a regime of terror, as I have, knows
that we ourselves helped give immediate terror a kind of omni-
presence: the real power of the state secret police lay in anxiety
about its unpredictability. It is really a myth that a state secret
police knows everything. Its presence is probably always an
extremely limited one. But there is something in this: domi-
nation that is based on force and not on consensus has to be
feared, and is effective for exactly that reason. The less a gov-
ernment is based on consensus, the more it has to behave in a
totalitarian way-and tolerance then necessarily appears to be
weakness. When the people it governs experience its activity as
purely arbitrary, it undermines its own possibility from within.
Nobody can depend on it. It is the peculiar nature of toler-
ance that the field of play within which things are tolerated
never has precise limits. Toleration means something quite dif-
ferent from law. Only where deeper solidarities are in play-for
example, an enlightened state's interest in eliminating inter-
denominational discord-can tolerance be possible as a virtue.
It seems that what we find today is this: where rationality
(Rationalitat) represents the ultimate criterion, its claim to
validity becomes "total." This unquestionably applies to the
that controls our economic system and the admin-
Istration of the modem state. For just this reason the ideal of
planning and administration that expects all government and
domination to be abolished by radically rationalizing all living


rd
. h' has had such a great attraction for both political
at1ons lpS . .
. ( . s .. :ntSimon
11
or even smce anctent sophistic)
utop1as smce ....
and utopian politics. . .
Now, it has to be said that the task of polittcs has always
been to base the government of men on actual solidarityll and
factual consensus. It may be that patriarchal forms of life in-
herendy approximate this ideal. In any case, it is unrealistic for
any form of state or government to postulate any kind of har-
mony between the people and the state, because every form of
power, not just that of a tyrant or an absolute ruler, is dedi-
cated to increasing its own power. The whole doctrine of poli-
tics and the constitution of states thus aims toward a consensus
of the governed, and tries to restrict the extent to which those
in power can attain further power. But this presupposes soli-
darity, which cannot be created by any constitution. Nietzsche
drew the most radical consequence of this when he recognized
the will to power as a universal principle and found it at work
not only in the rulers but also precisely in the things that hold
them back-for example, law courts, governing bodies, etc.-
and even in those who serve them.S
4
But then what can the
solidarity that lets us all live together be founded on?
At the beginning of our century Max Weber, the great soci
ologist, was already predicting that the world would progres
sively lose its magic through growing bureaucratization.
15
Since
then we have seen how inevitable this process is. It holds sway
throughout our social system, literally from birth to death, and
there is not a political system in the world that seems to know
any remedy for it.
This should not at all be confused with the distinction be
tween a single-party and a multi-party state. When the power
of the state is ideologized and it claims to possess the one rrue
this leads with an inherent logic toward the elimina
tlon of anyone who thinks at all differendy-as in the lnquisi-
91/Tht Idea ofTolnarut




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tion-which might mean physically annihilating them or treat-
ing them as mentally ill. But almost more ominous, because it
is imperceptible, is how the mass media influences our opinions
and consequently weakens our judgment.
16
The idea of com-
radeship used by modem totalitarian systems cannot obscure
the pressure to toe the party line. The sense of community that
it reveals has all the exclusivity of intolerance. But can parlia-
mentary democracy and the division of power, where the mul-
tiplicity of positions and interests find their balance, count as a
system of public pluralism? If the consensus of all is no more
than an anonymous election, then it is certainly significant that
political opponents in parliament always refer to one another as
"colleagues." This terminology from ancient Roman civil law
lives on wherever the stress is placed not on opposition but on
the solidarity that can unite and reconcile even the most en-
trenched opponents. But even in legislative bodies and within
the scope of the decisions they make, bureaucratization and the
automation of administration really run unchecked. We might
think of the party machine that restricts the representative's
freedom of choice, or of politicians' reliance on experts.
This condition is manifested in the concept of
and the role of the functionary. This term expresses how each
person and every function is subordinated to a system and de-
pendency on that system. Not just states and confederations
of states, but all the various interest groups whose antagonism
defines our political landscape, and even the economic systems
that try, in countless variations, to balance the power, or rather
the intervention, of the state and the free activity of workers
and entrepreneurs, are all interwoven with one another in
50
many different ways that we can plausibly speak of a single
tem of world economics and a single problem of world admin-
istration and the prevention of war. Every area of our lives
been integrated into this system and is now administered by lt
.
-
= -----
alongside everything else. Its influence extends from so-called
family life to the so-called culture industry. It seems inevitable:
economics is our fate.
From the state of affairs I have outlined, it becomes clear
what has been coming to fruition in individual minds, or even
in the convictions of small circles of people, and has now led
to an almost universal reaction among young people: uneasi-
ness about culture. It also becomes clear that this can lead to
emotional outbursts. Precisely because it has become a tangible
certainty in this system that everything depends on every-
body, the individual, indeed, whole generations of individuals
see themselves as having been, as it were, robbed of their free-
dom-the freedom of initiative. The consequence of this is the
purposeless call for adaptation; and if most people resign them-
selves to playing roles they do not enjoy in fulfilling whatever
function happens to fall to them, it is not always the worst
people who try to escape. Certainly anyone who questions the
power-monopoly of the modem constitutional state testifies in
doing so to his own helplessness. Such an individual becomes
entangled in that contradiction long ago outlined by Plato's
Crito:
17
wanting to exclude oneself from something one has al-
ready accepted.
We have all accepted the system under which we live. Max
Weber already used to insist on this in his time,
18
in his oppo-
sition to Romantic ideology and the esotericism of the George
circle. Absolute domination is no longer that of one individual
or a dominant class, however, but of a system. There is no des-
pot that could be driven from the throne, only an anonymous
domination that governs all. Now this is where the idea of tol-
erance gains a new significance, precisely because tolerance can
no longer be demanded of the one or the few who have power.
In the end nobody has power and everybody is in service. But
. hi .
or JUst t s reason, tolerance becomes a universal duty. In P
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of fact, the history of this idea shows how, through being in-
voked in constirutions and religious edicts, tolerance has ex-
panded beyond its original political meaning into a universal
moral requirement. Like all moral values, we become especially
aware of it and put it into words when someone neglects or
offends against it. Thus it is intolerance that we all want to
avoid being reproached with. The high hymn to tolerance that
Lessing's Nathan strikes up with the fable of the three rings
19
displays the continuity between religious toleration and the
universal human virtue of tolerance. Thus religious truth ulti-
mately proves to find its expression in human moral tolerance.
Herein lies something significant revealed by the above men-
tioned relation of strength, safety, and generosity to tolerance
and conversely the proximity of intolerance to weakness: tol-
erance is not the hesitation that concedes the other's rights
because it puts no trust in its own rights and power. The states-
man may profess general tolerance in religious things out of
indifference and skepticism, as perhaps in the case of the en-
lightened skeptic on the Prussian throne. But he too does this
not out of weakness but out of the strength of his civic con-
sciousness and trust that the power of this civic consciousness
in his subjects holds the state together.
We can discern the connection of tolerance with strength
and intolerance with weakness when, say, freedom of speech
is limited by censorship. The degree of leniency in censorship
corresponds to the level of the government's strength and secu-
rity, and so also to the strength that can be attributed to public
opinion and can be counted on. But we should not equate toler-
ance and freedom of speech just like that. In political life there
are always limits to the freedom of speech and publication.
In Wartime, for example, these freedoms are most restricted,

JUSt because that is when the commanders are most endan-
gered. And the impressive freedom of speech that characterizes,

--
: = ---
A
'""'" socierv. and that can directly increase respect
say, men....... .,, . . .
and admiration for divergent oparuons and for the soctally and
politically excluded, should not be allowed to the fact
that it is precisdy there that the pressure of soctal conventions
can intensify into a witch-hunt, especially where certain explo-
sive topics ("colored" people, anti-communism, sectarianism)
come into play.
Similarly, in human social intercourse there is a degree of
tolerance that expresses the strength or weakness of one's own
position and one's own nature. For example, we generally con-
sider someone intolerant if they cannot bear being contradicted,
and yet for our own part we would not lay claim to being
unconditionally and indiscriminately tolerant of others-when
we are of another opinion, for example, we don't always give
voice to our objection. Thus there is also something like self-
censorship. However much candor and mutual trust people's
relationships display, it is all embedded in that friendly, cour-
teous, considerate, and appreciative style of intercourse that
we notice when we consider how weak human self-confidence
(everybody's self-confidence, we must presume) really is. In
itself this is not so much tolerance as respect for the limits of
the tolerance one can expect from others; but even this is still
tolerance, and its neglect intolerance.
So tolerance is at work in all of this not only as a virtue of
social intercourse that has been bred into us, but also as a basis
for that human way of thinking that reckons on the other-
ness of the other and the multiplicity of othernesses that exist
alongside one another in our complicated and diversely tangled
reality. This one world in which we all live is marked by a di-
versity of languages, religions, cultures and traditions that, in
. ,
of the scientifically based rationality (Rationalitat) that is
valid for all of us, or in the end precisely because of it, repre-
sents a problem of tolerance that is hardly less severe than those
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of earlier times with the ruling orthodoxies of various churches
and religious denominations. Certainly the religious and espe-
cially the denominational problem of orthodoxy has lost some
of its currency in comparison with what it had, say, in the age
of the counter-Reformation and the supremacy of the Inqui-
sition, and likewise the civil constitutional state has disarmed
the political problem of tolerance. On the other hand, we can
see that new confrontations leading to intolerance are always
arising from the way distances are being closed up by mod-
em transportation, telecommunications technology, and all the
other possible modern forms of mobility. We might think of the
separatist tendencies in countries where language, religion, or
economic factors endanger the unity of a state that has evolved
in the course of history.
This makes all the clearer the moral duty of tolerance that
is a duty for each and every human being. With the dwindling
of collective ties and their self-evidence, it seems to have be-
come a new absolute duty. When people are not bound by any
other kind of community that might in some sense predeter-
mine the breadth of tolerance they afford one another, and
when, conversely, the clashing of interests among groups and
their organizations demands to be adjudicated, the ideal of a
legally secured order truly rules unchecked and so the tyranny
of function becomes the only decisive social factor. The tyranny
of function is the tyranny of the system into which we are in-
corporated and which compels us, as it were, to identify with
it. We are aware of this from the degree of intolerance that
our official duties impose on us. It takes no small measure of
self-distancing to keep oneself free from the pressure of this
identification, or to break free from it at the right moment. The
thoroughgoing rationalization and functionalization of all areas
of life do not so much promise a social constitution based on
power-free consensus as revitalize all the aspects of intolerance
---
-
-
that are intrinsic to the desire to govern and pursue one's inter-
ests. The intolerance of power that is worried about its power
has, as it were, shattered into its integral elements and has then
completely set in again. So in the end, we think just as we did
20o years ago when Habsburg Austria was professing religious
tolerance. Tolerance has again become the rarest of all virtues
,
but today it cannot be proclaimed in an edict.
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8
Isolation as a Symptom of
Self -Alienation
The job of philosophy is to clarify concepts, not to present a
new body of knowledge acquired through empirical research.
On the path toward the clarification of concepts, we need
an answer to the question "Is isolation a symptom of self-
alienation?" What is a symptom? It is that by which something
-an illness, for example-is recognized. Its logical structure is
to be something manifest in which something hidden and dan-
gerous becomes visible. The ancient Greeks described their at-
titude toward research like this: the visibility of what is hidden
lies in what shows itself. Thus no causal connection is implied
in the concept of the symptom. It is not claimed that the symp-
tom is the immediate effect of what it points to, but that there
must be some indirect connection between a symptom, which
makes something recognizable, and what is made recognizable
by it. So it is always appropriate to pose alongside the question
of whether isolation is a symptom of self-alienation the further
question whether self-alienation is a cause of isolation.
IsoLATION AND SoLITUDE
The first thing to notice is that we are talking here about iso-
lation and not solitude. So the first question we must ask our-
selves is whether there can ever be isolation for anyone who is
familiar with solitude. Isolation is a form of loss. What is lost
in it is nearness to others. In the experience of isolation there
A public lecture given in Bern. -4 July 969
101
----
seems to be suffering along with the solitude. But solitude is
really a very ambivalent phenomenon. Not just philosophers,
but anyone who really wants to think about the experience of
solitude must deal with two very different aspects of it. Soli-
tude is not always a suffering. To be sure, it presents itself
that way at first. There is being forsaken by one's friends-one
thinks of Job or Christ on the Mount of Olives.
1
To be for-
saken by friends is to be deprived of the supporting nearness
of others. Now, this being forsaken by the supporting nearness
of others can be viewed as a very close neighbor of that other
forsaking with which we are familiar- being forsaken by God.
Even in talk of a "god-forsaken place" we can hear the origi-
nal God-forsa.kenness of Christ's last words on the cross.
2
In
any religious experience there is an inner connection between
the forsa.kenness of the nearness of others and the forsakenness
of God. It is not only Christ's commandment of love that sees
love of one's neighbor and one's relationship with God together.
There is also a lovely Greek phrase of Euripides: "To embrace
friends, that is God."
3
What the Greeks wanted to bring to
expression here is the same as what Holderlin once called the
social sphere that is God." In this conceptual definition, the
opposite of solitude is implied: to stand in a communal sphere
and to be supported by something communal. The affiiction of
isolation inflicts on us the diminution and the loss of this com-
munal support.
But being deserted by the support of communality is surely
only one side of the phenomenon of solitude. Solitude can
also be sought. If we want to pose the problem of man's self-
alienation in society on the right plane of questioning at all,
then we shall have to immerse ourselves in this phenomenon
for a while. I suppose the quest for solitude is essentially a
discovery that was brought into the general consciousness by
Rousseau. In many German towns there is a Philosophenweg, a
llS II Symptom of Stlf-.Aiitnlltion
"philosophers' path:" there's an especially famous one in Hei-
delberg. For those with an ear for history, this "philosophers'
path" is not named after the philosophy professors. We should
rather understand a "philosopher" as someone who has a re-
markable inclination for walking through the area alone. That
is the original meaning of the common street name Philoso-
phenweg. Indeed, it really isn't obvious that anyone would want
to go for a walk alone. Perhaps that's just peculiar to the age
of introspection, and to the search for the innocence of nature
amid the corruption of morals-if I may, with Rousseau, ex-
press myself so critically of culture.
Now, what is sought in the quest for solitude is not actually
solitude, but "abiding" with something, undisturbed by anyone
or anything else. So what one is looking for on the philoso-
phers' path is not really solitude at all, but the soft breathing
of nature that takes one up into his life as if through a ges-
ture of sympathy. Goethe has the harpist sing: "Who devotes
himself to solitude, alas, is soon alone."
5
What this line means
is that solitude can hold an attraction for the human soul, can
even arouse an intoxication that wards off anything that might
disturb the intimacy of this condition. The quest for solitude is
always the desire to hold on to something.
Thus the lwer seeks solitude because he is completdy filled
by yearning: this being-held-onto by something absent, which
could not be replaced by any possible presence. Solitude also
exists in an unsought way for the elderly. They obviously have
the scent of solitude about them. Because an old man can and
does look back on too much, he is beyond the reach of other
people. One thinks of the marvdous pictures of solitude in
Rembrandrs late period-the solitude of the eye that gazes
toward us from the shadow: it sees nothing more because it ex-
pects nothing more, since it is no longer looking forward but
back into itself. Another form of solitude that besets one un-
Isolation 111 a Symptom



I


--
sought is the solitude that is concealed in power. The powerful
man is solitary. It is the curse of power that the anticipated will
of the powerful gets reflected back to him along the thousand
paths of flattery: great powerful men have always also been
great despisers of men. Flattery and fear weave the veil of soli-
tude that surrounds the powerful. Again, we must not mistake
the solitude of the wise man for forsakenness. His path is soli-
tary because he does not share the interests of others; since he
is so experienced and his view of reality so free of illusion, it is
not possible for him to share in others, intoxication. The great
example of such solitude is Zarathustra in Nietzsche,s poetical
fiction,' who has to seek solitude again and again. What makes
him so solitary is his knowledge, a knowledge that divides him
from all others and pursues him throughout the whole history
of his solitary life: the insight into the breakdown of all existing
values. Finally, religion tells us that solitude is to be sought: in
Christianity, we are familiar with the solitude of prayer, which
goes back to the solitude of the Son of Man.
Solitude, then, is something quite different from isolation.
Isolation is an experience of loss and solitude is an experience
of renunciation. Isolation is suffered-in solitude something is
being sought.
SELF-ALIENATION AND SociAL CoMPULSION
Our preliminary examination shows us that the familiar social
phenomenon of self-alienation is close to isolation. The con-
cept of self-alienation is an expression of a social sickness-per-
haps also of suffering in society. Alienation always presupposes
an original intimacy and is experienced as an increasing alien-
ness. When two people become estranged from one another,
each senses an alienation from the other person who was once
close to h' Th ill b
. Im. at IS st not a separation, not yet a breach, ut
a mountmg uneasiness that the familiar closeness is becoming
'04
1
Isolation llS a Symptom of St/f-Aiitnation
false. The intimacy has not yet vanished, but just seems to be
dwindling. For someone who becomes isolated, this experience
of dwindling intimacy becomes intense. The world of nearness
becomes altogether more and more alien to him. A well-known
part of isolation's tendency toward inner self-involvement is
that a person can no longer extricate himself from it and ap-
proach other people, but seems instead to have drowned in it.
So isolation does always have something to do with man's be-
coming a stranger in the world and in the human world as
a whole.
But such isolation is still far from being the self-alienation
of man in society. I should ask, therefore, what the intimacy is
that becomes alien there. The answer can only be that work, as
one's own work, becomes alien to man. That obviously implies
that work essentially determines one's self. That is self-evident
to us, but in truth it signifies that work-the only nc:w god of
our age-is the last worldly god of the polytheistic tradition
still to be honored among us. What could lead to its seeming
to be no longer our own work?
It is not only in modernity that human society is founded
on the division of labor in which an individual's work satisfies
not just his own immediate needs but common needs. And it
is just as clear that in this system for satisfying common needs
through divided labor the concept of a need is very loosely de-
fined. It is debatable precisely what people's divided labor is
supposed to provide: is it the necessities of life, or is it more
than that? Is human society possible at all when work produces
only the necessities? It is worth considering to what extent
what the Greeks called to ll.alon, the beautiful in the broad sense
of a free surplus and superfluity, is that whereby human society
satisfies itself as human.
The form in which the division of labor is now organized,
and determines the individual's place in society, is tenned one's
Isolation as a Symptom ofSttf-AiitnalionliOS

,

I


'
-
r A profession has the form of indirect identification
proieSSlOn.
h h -rsal For
11
profession" patently means that the
Wlt t e Unh"'
specific tasks and arising from an
activities are consciously legsttmated through the untversal. We
shall still have to ask ourselves what are the effects of having a
rofession for the life of society as a whole. To me, one thing
certain: that the decreasing possibility of identifying
with the universal is what we call the self-alienation of man in
society.
The complaint about the self-alienation of man was already
making itself heard in the age of the Enlightenment. Friedrich
von Schiller's letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man"
7
speak of the dead, soulless machine-state in which each indi-
vidual works only as a cog or a link without-to state the
meaning of this metaphor-his individual consciousness being
connected with the activity of the whole. It is against the dead
soulless machine-state that Schiller, in his magnificent letters,
sets up the idea of the free activity of man and a state of free-
dom, and proposes the remarkable Weimar excursus on play and
the state of aesthetic education. It was Schiller's impulse that
led Karl Marx-who put the self-alienation of man down to
the artificial relations of production, the fetishization of money,
and the commodification of human labor-directly to his cri-
tique of the capitalist economic system.
These things are well known. The self-alienation of man
then applied to a particular class situation, and designated the
employers' exploitation of the proletariat. When we reconsider
the phenomenon of self-alienation, the problem arises under
gready altered circumstances. Today the self-alienation of man
in society can no longer be spoken of as the domination of
one class by another class that alone enjoys freedom-as in the
case of the consciousness of the master who uses the servile
consciousness and lives off the work of the servant. We live
Io6/ lsolation as a Symptom of Self-Aiimation
b
in a modem social welfare state. What we experience there is
that we all lack freedom, and that seems to me to be the self-
alienation that concerns us today.
What is it based on? What is this lack of freedom that every-
body experiences today? Everyone immediately thinks of the
professional consciousness that I started out with, and which
included a direct reference to the universal. Today, through
the rationalization of the ways in which human work is de-
ployed, this consciousness has suffered a curious limitation, so
that the basic consciousness of man in our thoroughly rational-
ized society is really that each individual is replaceable. This, I
think, is where the reasons are to be found why we are denied
identification with the universal.
Let's describe a few forms of this denial. They are experi-
ences of compulsion. But what strange kind of compulsion can
this be, to which we are exposed only by our own experience?
It is not the compulsion of a master, of somebody stronger, or
of any superior who dictates our actions. If it were, we should
always be able to fight against it with our own powers of resis-
tance. What gives us the feeling that we lack freedom is rather
our insight into the rational obligation (rationale Sachzwang)
that dominates us all. The individual's initiative in trying to
find a way that he can work for the universal is oddly para-
lyzed by the complexity of the social system of production and
labor in which we live: we experience this again and again in
all sorts of ways. Our thoroughly rationalized society suffers
from something similar to what psychiatrists call the repetition
compulsion. The repeating of actions compulsively seems to be
a good simile for the essence of "administration." Administra-
tion wants us to do as we have done in the past. In order to be
administered, our world has to be made uniform, and so it is
not malice that rejects every innovation: we know in advance
what has to be done, and how. Anyone who would like to do
Isolation as a Symptom of
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h
fi ds himself condemned by the rational obligation
ot erwtse n
to take up a position that is not of itself transparent to him.
This already explains why animosity toward our cultural world
is becoming so noticeable, especially in the younger generation.
Or we could look at another experience of such compulsion,
again one that is just as innocent as it is h r ~ and tyranni-
cal. 1 mean the compulsion to consume, somethmg that hardly
anybody can avoid who does not possess a great measure of
inner freedom. For the organization of consumption and sell-
ing is virtUally compelled by our whole economic system. It is
not really possible to escape, in any kind of free determination
of needs, from the consumer goods provided by industry and
the economy, when the flood of uniformly generated consumer
desires sweeps us, so to speak, in through the doors of the de-
partment stores.
Behind this there is a still deeper compulsion, which I con-
sider the most serious of these compulsions. We are compelled
to believe certain things: not because we are commanded to,
but just because they come sugared with the sweet poison of
information politics. We are all constantly exposed to a flood of
information from which we cannot escape. A child that grows
up without a television pays for it early-one look at that child's
school essays shows that he doesn't know the rubrics under
which this wave of information has channeled the universal
consciousness. The consequence of this is belief-compulsion;
for the information is no longer direct, carried from me to
you in a conversation, but is always mediated by a selective
agency-the press, the printed word, radio, and television.' In
democratic states these agencies are in turn privately controlled,
but we are still aware of the extent to which the obligation
of. keeping to the tried and tested ways of doing things re-
stncts initiative and the possibility of actual control. In other
words compuls ill
' 1on IS st occurring here. It seems that any-
Jo8/ lsolaJUJn 4S a Symptom of St!f-Aiitnalion
~
.
n
one who thinks that some person must be responsible for this
l.
has not completely woken up to the gravity of our situation.
The self-alienation of man in modern society is a universal one,
'
d
l.
and it is coupled with the awareness of an unfathomable de-
1,
pendence and alienness, so that an individual's work not only
1-
seems meaningless to him, but contributes to a sense of gen-

.y
eral, unfathomable alienness. It is this lack of freedom that is
>f
experienced as the self-alienation of man in society.

l-
It induces us to withdraw into our private shells. But whoever

takes this path experiences at the same time the impossibility
IS
n
of withdrawing. For if I seek the "lamplight of the private., (as
. d Marx called it), all I do is hide from myself the dependencies

~ r that determine me without my being able to detect them. Pre-
-
cisely in a liberal political system, we all have to pay for every

I
lapse of political solidarity, because we can't hope to avoid our

1-
common fate just by ducking and hoping that the lightning will
I
:d
strike elsewhere.
'
.
.
o,


:>f
FRIENDSHIP- WITH OTHERS AND WITH ONESELF
Jf
This experience of unfathomable dependencies now clarifies
vs
the contrary claim, which we can designate as a completely

l's
social consciousness. The communality that is missing from
er
our lives is extrapolated into the form of a consciousness that
al
takes up the cause of the future of society as its very own affair.
n;
This kind of consciousness manifests itself today in the accusa-

to
tion that our parents' generation is responsible for the universal
ve
lack of freedom that I have described. It manifests itself just
[n
as much in our being satiated with prosperous civilization as
<i,
it does in the flight toward utopias. It also manifests itself in
)0
the way that every restriction is experienced as an injudicious
e-
repression. There's a new word that is symptomatic of this;
1
~ e r
~ c r d it recently when an interviewer on the street was ask:
y-
tng people "Warum hort der Leidensdruck eigentlich nie auf?
Isolatilm as a Symptom ofSt!f-Aiitfllllio111109
1:

:11
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(Wh does the pressure of suffering never really stop?) This
new :ord "Leidensdruck" (pressure of suffering) seems to be-
s ak our warding off all experience of reality. For experience
pe all d . . d'.
of reality is experience of ch enges an opposltlon, an 1t 1s
never without suffering, as well as the overcoming of opposi-
tion. Leidensdruck, on the other hand, sounds like something
we escape by getting drunk, or by immersing ourselves in col-
lective activity. Privacy is certainly not to be placed above all
else, and it is worth being able to sacrifice our private interests
to communal tasks. But there is something lacking in the fun-
damental conditions of human community if the demands of
modem society are experienced as the pressure of suffering that
is even more to be warded off than the suffering of isolation.
Complaining about the pressure of suffering is just another way
to deny one's isolation, and it bears witness to complete self-
alienation: our society is entering further and further into this
danger-zone. For it is part of the negative ideal of liberation
from the pressure of suffering that no positive identification
with the universal justifies the experience of challenges and re-

stncttons.
It is worth going back to the most ancient insights here.
One of the greatest lessons we can learn from the Greek clas-
sics is the central significance accorded to friendship in Greek
ethics. In modem ethical works, the most coverage the prob-
lem of friendship ever gets is a thin chapter in some appendix.
In Kant we find the beautiful and thought-provoking expres-
. ,. .
Slon: a true fnend must be as rare as a black swan."
10
But that's
about all he has to say on the subject. In Aristotle's Ethics, on
the other hand, it occupies the central main section and makes
up a quarter of the whole.l
1
What is friendship? The Greek word for it is phi/ia. This
concept comprehends so many dimensions! It includes every
form in which men li h d . e1a
ve toget er, an refers to busmess r uons
IIO/ lso/Qtifln as a Symptom Dj'St!f-AiitnaJion
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l
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1

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[
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i
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!

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and teamwork as much as to camaraderie in war or married
I

5
I
life, and the formation of social groups and political panies-
-

in short to the entire life of the human community. What is
..
5
still called Partei.freundschafl in German today is a last echo of
this ancient Greek generic term. As an old Pythagorean say-

~
ing has it, part of the essence of friendship is that I(Otva
7
;,. Twv
cpiAwv-everything is held in common by friends.u This sug-
-
J
gests that friendship is based on a sense of solidarity. We must
s
I
not be led astray by the sound of the word "friendship" into
I
I
thinking that it conjures up the beauty of some bygone state

'
f
I
of spiritual life. The opposite is the case. Life together can be
t
I
established on no other basis than binding solidarities. Thus all
loss of solidarity signifies the suffering of isolation, and, con-

y
versely, solidarity always already presupposes what the Greeks
-
called "friendship with oneself," which is brought about, as was

s shown above, by valuing solitude, and made possible by the ca-
pacity to be contentedly alone. In our word "solitude," there is
l
1
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certainly also a suggestion of our fending off the soulless ma- l
I
I
- chine of civilization, and a suggestion of sympathy with nature
that knows nothing of the human vices. That is the connotation



that Rousseau bestowed on the word ccsolitude." But what the
-
Greeks called friendship-and also precisely what they called
(
friendship with oneself-retains a deep truth.
-
Plato founded his whole design for a utopian state on the
.
idea that it should be a replica of the soul on a larger scale.u

-
The peculiar construction of the state that he describes, with
s
its arrangement of three fixed classes and its class of guard-

l
~ n s whose insight steers the destiny of the whole, claims to
f
s
illustrate what the human soul is and can be. His idea of a con-
I
I
stitution that rules out inner discord and binds all the members


I
s
I
of the state together in solidary action mirrors the human soul's
y
I
ability to master its own internal divisions, despite all its con-
!
s

flicts and pent-up urges, and to unite behind one thing. Man's
I

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I
.

Isolation as a Symptom D,(St!J-Aiknalion/111

.l
inner constitution and his ability to be part of a community are
fundamentally one. Only someone who is friends with himself
can fit into what is common.
We are familiar with the case of somebody who is anti-social
in the narrow psychiatric sense of the word. He is character-
ized precisely by the fact that his being intimate with himself
and his living together with himself, his unity with himself, has
slipped away and broken into pieces. Thus "friendship" here
means a fundamental constitution of humanity, that I might
call (with Hegel) "being at home with onesel."
14
It is not only
today that young people have started rebelling against the way
their elders are "at home with themselves." Things were similar
when we were young. We saw being too homey with bourgeois
society as a loss of freedom and idealism. Nevertheless, friend-
ship with oneself is not tied to this external form of smugly
being at home with oneself. Rather, it is the basis of an experi-
ence of freedom that we can still achieve today without stoop-
ing to a conformism of which we disapprove. I would remind
you that in work man is able to find a sense of his own. Even
when we feel the compulsions of modem civilization and its
mounting pressure, work, and the consciousness of one's own
ability that is formed as a result of it, signifies a mysterious
form of freedom. I for one think that the consciousness of one's
ability is the only form of freedom that can be safely preserved
in the face of all the compulsions of our world.
Hegel saw this with wonderful clarity in his famous chapter
on lordship and bondage.
15
There he shows that it is not the
master but the servant who possesses true self-consciousness,
not because he keeps the master enchained to his enjoyment
and so is or could be his master's master, but because the
servant always already possesses a higher self-consciousness-
namely, the consciousness of his own ability-than the master
who is dependent on his servitude. In his ability to work, he
'"/ Isolation as a Symptom ofSt!f-Aiitnation


nnyare
himself

a-social
.racter-

:umself
elf, has
"h , ere
might
ot only
he way
similar
Jtgeois
:"riend-
;mugly
~
stoop-
emind
. Even
md its
'sown

:enous
f one's
;erved
1apter
:>t the
sness,
tment
;e the
tess-
Jaster
k, he
finds a sense of himself that could not be communicated by the
parasitic relation to pleasure enjoyed by the master.
Thus as Hegel rightly saw, the servile consciousness, because
it is conscious of the freedom bestowed by its ability, is on
the way to a self-consciousness that is more genuinely human
than is the master's proud self-consciousness. Now, in the con-
sciousness of freedom that arises from ability, which is the only
grounded self-consciousness, individual being is always sur-
passed by what is common. Ability founds solidarity. Solidarity
in ability, responsibility in one's profession, and the knowledge
that I share with others and allow others to control, are all
forms of solidarity that refer back to the one inherent, fun-
damental possibility that man has of aligning himself with, or
even of making friends with, himself and the world, by work-
ing. The untranslatable Greek expression for this phenomenon
is "friendship with oneself., It has nothing to do with self-love
or egotism: actually, it means the exact opposite. Someone who
is not friends with himself, but at odds with himself, is just not
fit for any devotion to anyone else, or for any solidarity. It seems
that the most profound basis for the self-alienation that we see
spreading through modem civilized life lies here, but so also
does our inalienable opportUnity to conduct our business with
the conscious sense of self; in this activity alone do we possess
a consciousness of genuine knowledge and genuine ability, in
the midst of modem society's undisguisable forms of compul-
sion. Only in this way can the fate of modem civilization that
specialization promotes, instead of ushering in self-alienation,
represent the possibility of aligning oursdves with the univer-
sal and mediate our social conditionedness with our own con-
sciousness of life.
Lo/4Jion tu tl Sy,ptom of St!f-AiimiUion/ IIJ

..
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---
ezz 2 a 115 a
9
Man and His Hand in Modern
Civilization
PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS
As the process of civilization marches on around us, the con-
ditions within which we work are changing more and more.
No longer can it be assumed that even the most inspired cre-
ative ideas will get converted into industrial production, when
the whole way in which we communicate with one another has
been incorporated, through our technologically organized mass
media, into the process of industrialization. Economic interests
lead to cheap production and the imitation of already available
designs being justified and enforced in the name of business
.. rationality" (R.ationalitiit) . . No false romantic nostalgia can
help us now. We must come to terms with this reality, keeping
a practical eye out for the positive possibility that it offers.
It all comes down to the problem of being human. The first
thing we assume here is that our senses need to be cultivated
{die Sinne sich bilden miissen), and this includes the idea that
man must cultivate himself. In this context we sometimes use
a word borrowed from the Latin and say that man requires
uculture." Man's need to cultivate himself clearly distinguishes
him from the rest of the animal kingdom, where we observe an
easily acquired mastery of motions and behaviors. Man needs
to form himself into something (sich zu etwas bilden), because
he is not equipped with that wonderful instinctive certainty
that nature has bestowed upon the animals, allowing them to
A lecture given in Munich, IS February 1978.
U4

!
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t
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t
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orient themselves to the goals of the species: self-preservation
I
and the furthering of life. We humans have thoughts, doubts,
I
and choices about what we should form ourselves into. And
this in rum means that we use criteria of evaluation that make

rational choice possible for us.
All these realities indicate man's unique situation. By con-
mst to the demoniacal impulses of our animal instincts, the
I
human spirit is faced with a specific impotence: because we
think rather than just act instinctively, we are constantly deal-
:on-
I
ing with possibilities and playing with possibilities. Clearly, the
tore.

problem of man is this: how can we find a balance that fulfills
I
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ere-
the law of our nature when we are just as much sensuous crea-
1hen
I
rures as moral ones, just as pervaded and governed by natural
r has
instincts as moved by the motivating and supervising power of
mass
our ideas? We are obviously defined by something more than
rests
just self-preservation, something that includes the whole of
lable
J
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t
human culture, history, progress, regression, decline, recovery,



mess
I
I
and re-establishment, and everything that makes human his-
I

can

tory so exemplary and so tragic for every reflective person .

:ptng
What is at the bottom of this? How are we to find the
: first
right orientation, a human balance between the sensuous and
moral aspects of our nature? Biologists and anthropologists
rated
-for example, Friedrich Nietzsche
1
or in our time Arnold
. that
Gehlen
1
- have come to the conclusion that the natural equip-
:s use
ment distinctive of humans is our non-specialization. Modem

1uues
evolutionary theory and paleontology show us how nature is
Lishes
always trying to produce more and more kinds of specializa-
vean
I
I
tion. One species starves because it can no longer reach down
needs
to the ground with its neck, another proves unable to adapt to
I
cause

I
changed climatic conditions, as with the mammoth. In con-
rainty
trast, it is the distinguishing mark of man to be so unspecialized

~ to

'
as to be endowed with a fantastic, virtually unlimited capacity
to adapt. If we want to grasp the crisis to which the process

'
':\

.._
--
of human civilization has led us, we must see the opportunities
and the dangers that our human non-specialization brings.
With this in mind, we have every reason to consider the
hand. As Aristotle's famous aphorism puts it, the hand is the
tool of all tools.' This should not be understood in an empty
comparative sense, as if Aristotle wanted to say that the hand
is a much better tool than all other tools. It means more than
that. This part of the body is not itself a tool-it serves no
specific ends-but it has the ability to fashion other things to
serve as its tool-kit for whatever ends it chooses. So the hand
is an intdlective organ, a limb that serves for many things and
makes many things serve it .
That is why this part of the body is so closely linked with
language. The hand not only makes and handles things, it also
points to things. There is even a language of the hands: like the
human voice, the hand is an organ of communication, which
also involuntarily expresses certain things about the person. The
whole person is embodied in the hand in the same way that the
whole universe of human experience of the world is embodied
in language. Together the hand and the speaking voice repre-
sent the highest perfection of human non-specialization.
This brings us into a whole new domain, beyond animal self-
preservation and beyond nature-the-artises inexhaustible play
of forms. The clever, deliberate creations of free human being
bring a constant surplus into human life: play, imitation, rite,
ceremony, and all those things that, unnecessary as they are
stimulating, we call the beautiful. This is obviously a list that
could be extended further, and it enumerates the opportunities
that follow from the non-specialization of being human.
But our characteristic lack of specialization also has its dan-
gers. That man has a universal capacity for culture and cultiva-
tion means at the same time that he can fall into a kind of arti-
ficial specialization. He lacks the stable equilibrium of a sound,
116/ Man and His Hand in Modern Cifliliuuion
~

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healthy animal that uses its instincts and senses to survive. Our
human abilities give us innumerable possibilities quite different
le
from this kind of natural balance, but they are possibilities de-
1e
termined by specialization-by work and so always by dividing
:y

up work and a process of the division of labor. This now brings
td
I
us to a whole new dimension of being human, to the social

I

Ln
constitution that is peculiar to humanity.
10 I
1 am not going to discuss what forms of order can success-
T
I
fully fashion the basic political constitution of human life. It is
to
I


sufficient to make dear how the specialized abilities at our dis-
ld

.

posal inevitably make us all dependent. The modem world has
ld
I
managed to achieve so astonishingly much through its ability
th and its genius that it has learned, with the help of science and
.so
its technical application, to control and use the forces of nature
he
to an ever greater extent; for just this reason, it views and treats
.ch
I
the individual person only as fulfilling a function within the
be whole of a rational system. The individual stands in a func-
:he tiona! context that allows him less and less creative freedom. As
ied a result of our whole cultural process, the individual finds him-
re- self more and more in the service of functions, circumscribed
by functioning robots and machines. Instead of having the kind
!If-
of control over things allowed by abilities, which leaves space
,lay
for the creative play of self-expression, a new kind of universal

I
slavery has come over mankind .
. tog


We have to view this slavery as an inescapable fate: man must
tte,
I
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are
serve (bedienen) in a functional role. It may be that people of
:hat
I
today no longer have to serve (dienen)-i.e., serve other people
I

I
-but, paradoxically, they must now serve (bedienen) the but-
1t1eS

tons and levers of the mechanisms that control industrial and
I an-
agricultural production. With this devdopment, all our human

capabilities lose their equilibrium, as does the balance that
~ v a

seems so natural between instinct and intellect, between the
iU'U
und,
way the world limits us and the freedoms it allows us in shap-
Man am/ His Hand in Modmr Cifliliwionl 117
-
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'
--
. ,., hould be under no illusion: it is science that most
mg tt. vve s .
deeply determines this contemporary form of human
The enormous estimation that our culture accords to sctence
is nobody's fault or mistake. Science is the most productive
factor in our economy and without the continuing productive
development of science, without scientific developments and
their ingenious technical applications, we can neither maintain
the standard of our own civilization nor look forward to im-
proved living conditions for mankind as a whole. We need to
see how the hand can coexist with calculation. Calculation, not
so much intellect, mind, or understanding, is the omnipotent
power organizing our lives. It is what is underneath the com-
plete mediation of our life by industrial civilization: no one even
knows the calculations his own hand-outs depend on, which is
what makes life so unsatisfactory and so unintuitive.
What about a balance, then? Both sides must obviously be
cultivated. Losing a hand means a loss in cultivated senses, but
we saw that it is the person himself that needs to be cultivated,
his understanding as well as his senses. So the way man is de-
termined and structured confronts him from his cradle on with
both resignation and freedom: on the one hand, there is the
asceticism of work with its renunciation of the immediate sat-
isfaction of desires, even to the point of renouncing all insight
into one's own activity in a world of work that has become
alien; and on the other hand. there is the insatiable longing
to recognize oneself in the world and to become at home in a
world that one has oneself formed.
Thus there is no genuine opposition between intellect and
the senses. The hand is an intellective organ, and our senses
display their own intelligence insofar as they are inspired by the
hand that can touch, grasp, and point as if by freedom. The
have a certain intelligence, an openness that defends
ttself against instinctive biases, uncontrolled prejudice, emo-
rr8/ Man anti His Hantl in Motlmr Cifliliution
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be
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tiona! distortion, and indiscriminate inundation by the flood of
stimulation. Cultured senses: that ultimately means developing
the human capacity for choice and judgment. But the reverse
holds true as well-the sensory quality of intelligence. Intel-
ligence is like an unspecialized sense, like the skin that feels
everything, an extreme of receptivity and sensitivity. What we
call mind or intelligence or reason ( Vununft) is a truly universal
capacity to understand things, and is in no way limited to the
arithmetical arts, measuring procedures, and the tasks of calcu-
lation that are so indispensable for technical rationality (Ratio-
nalitat). If reason (Vernunft) were no more than that, noth-
ing would be able to save us from suffocating mandarins who
would give us omnipotent bureaucracy and stagnating progress
in technology and civilization .
But what does it mean, we ask, to cultivate one's senses and
intelligence? Cultivating (Bilden) is not making. Thus cultiva-
tion is closely tied to the conception of the end for which some-
thing has been cultivated, so that it is now a such-and-such.
Hence cultivation cannot mean developing particular capabili-
ties into proficiencies. Being capable of correcdy following a
production procedure by pressing a button at the right mo-
ment is cenainly also a capability and a proficiency that needs
to be laboriously learned and thoroughly mastered. But when it
comes to cultivation, this possibility of devdoping one's capa-
bilities is not at issue-it has to do with being in such a way
as to make meaningful use of one's capabilities. So cultivation
is not to be confused with acquiring proficiencies. Proficiencies
are necessary things, and our education should certainly also de-
velop the capabilities of our senses in a rational way, much more
than is the case in a school system controlled by the political
and economic interests of industrial society. But if such devd-
opment of proficiencies is to constitute a person's cultivation,
50
that he becomes a cultivated man with cultivated senses, there
Man and His Hand in Modtm

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b
. s1 be something else involved: distance from his
must o VlOU y . .
own abilities and from his own btases ~ d hts self-awareness of
his own abilities. For someone has culuvated senses only if he
is able to see with the sensibility of the whole of his nature, to
be observant, notice other things and enter into them.
This sensory cultivation leading to cultivated sensibility is
not just an incidental characteristic that might perhaps, under
the right circumstances, ripen into special giftedness or real
artistic achievements. Artists are fine as they are. But there also
have to be people who really need and want their artworks, and
that requires a cultivated sensibility. We call this the cultivation
of taste: this includes cultivation to the point where one has
one's own capacity of judgment. We know how difficult that is.
Imitation, mimicry, and fashion reign.
In modem universities, people learn the same way as at
school. Future teachers, doctors, and lawyers are examined on
the basis of their memory and their formal intellectual pro-
ficiency. The university gives them preparatory schooling in
theory. Their real education begins only when they begin to
practice. To me, our educational system seems somewhat back-
ward, in that students' theoretical preparation excludes them
for far too long from participating in the various practical ac-
tivities of the professions and careers to which they aspire. It's
an old problem-how can we diminish the gulf between theo-
retical academic education and real practical education in such
a way that people who want to be, say, teachers, don't simply
have to put aside what they've learned at university when they
start their teacher training in order to use the favorite books
of whoever is organizing the course, who naturally prefers the
books that he or she studied as a student? This is obviously the
counterpart of the problem we find with theoretical university
education: that the ensuing real, practical education does not
lead in its turn to .. Bildung," but is just a kind of breaking-in
1 ~ Man anti His Hantl in Modem Ci"iliution


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On both sides, the system (although not necessarily any par-
ticular individuals) lacks an awareness of what Bildung really
is. Bildung requires and enables one to see things through the
eyes of others. Wherever it holds sway, it prevents the par-
ticular kinds of one-sidedness that go with school practice, the
knowledge gained at college, the mere talent for copying, and
the pure training of memory.
This seems to be the current significance of training one's
senses, and we must obviously consider the socio-political con-
sequences of reinstating a genuine equilibrium between our
sensuous and moral powers. The salient distinguishing feature
of art and of the beautiful was that these things are not brought
about by mere application of rules, nor is that how one under-
stands them. Art and the beautiful oblige us to use our own
judgment. When we consider something beautiful, that in itself
means we are ourselves making a judgment. It may be that we
often deceive ourselves by just imitating and repeating instead
of trusting our own senses and their judgment, but even then
this imitating and repeating still follows somebody who really
means to judge for themselves, and in the end everybody con-
siders themselves called upon to judge.
This is the great head-start that sensory cultivation and the
claim of art offer us in attempting to humanize our lives in
our state, society, and administration. Little has fundamentally
changed since Schiller hoped aesthetic education would give us
a way of progressing toward freedom from the soulless mecha-
nism of the state apparatus.
4
The task before us is still the same.
Our capacity for judgment is limited because we are biased
by our interests and prejudiced opinions, by our traditions and
revolutions, as well as by the whole organized practice of mass
manipulation. The automatism of our entire civilized life no
longer so easily permits us to feel that we have judgment or
that we must credit ourselves with judgment. The high value
Man and His Hand;, Modmt CM/iZAJirml m


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that the modem working world places on the asceticism that
makes specialist sk.ills a duty for the individual leads only too
easily to the renunciation of individual judgment in favor of a
judgment that is common to all. But then what politically free
ways of ordering our lives remain? Only if we think and judge
for ourselves about social and political questions and about all
the decisions of our own life-experience, despite knowing our
limitations and biases, can we hope that the elected political
powers-the legislators and the governments that they set up-
might also be capable of real cultivated judgment. For in order
to hit upon the decisions they have to make, they require the
broad resonance of a social whole whose members are willing
to use judgment and are capable of critique as well as approval.
In/ Man and His Hand in Modtrn Cifliliutum
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IO
The Expressive Force of Language
ON THE FUNCTION OF RHETORIC IN
GAINING KNOWLEDGE
In modern civilization the topic of rhetoric is no longer what it
was at its ancient origin, nor is it the same as the "rhetoric'' that
has attended our cultural tradition for so many centuries. For us,
the change has to do with converting the art of talking into the
art of writing and the art of reading. Talking is talking always
to someone or in the presence of someone. This is definitive of
the art of talking, but it applies equally to the art of writing and
reading that follows from it. For writing too is writing always
for someone, however indefinite the addressee may be.
This at once makes clear a problem hidden behind this whole
range of topics: the dissociation of writing and reading, which
brings about a fundamental modification of understanding.
How to bridge the distance between the meaning fixed by the
writer and that understood by the reader is the basic question
of hermeneutics. For modernity, this is also its pre-eminent
problem. I have myself contributed several investigations
1
to
showing how the theory of understanding, that is the theory
of reading, arises not just on its own but also from the theory
of rhetoric. Philip Melanchthon's "Rhetoric," that famous
Wittenberg lecture that is printed in three books in the Corpus
Rtformatum,l passes silently, as it were, from the basic rhetorical
question of composing speeches to the basic hermeneutic ques-
A lecture on the general theme of "scholarly prose," given in Wolfen-
bOttel in 1
979

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tion of understanding the construction of what is written, and
so to reading. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that today
what is at issue is not speakers but writers. Here, in literary
aesthetics, 1 believe, lie many as yet unsurmounted problems.
Note that there is not only a distinction between a pre-literary
civilization and a literary one, but also between a style of writ-
ing that produces texts that lend themselves to being read aloud
and one that produces them for silent reading. I believe these
are problems that we shall have to incorporate into our aesthet-
ics of style in a way quite different from what has hitherto been
the case.
I am a bit of a classical philologist; so for me the connection
between rhetoric and writing is an old Platonic problem. I recall
here that Plato's quarrel with rhetoric has two sides. For him,
rhetoric is not merely what it is in our general consciousness,
where it has acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation-the
art of flattery that can talk anyone into anything without any
sincere conviction or relationship to the truth. Above all in the
Gorgias, Plato made us aware of this once and for all in that
famous comparison between rhetoric and cookery. But in the
Phaedrus, he also said that rhetoric can sometimes stand. in
an essential relation to finding and communicating insight and
knowledge.
3
I believe Plato displayed great insight in showing
that true rhetoric is not to be divided from what he calls "dia-
lectic," dialectic in that originary sense that comprises the art
of conducting a conversation. In the end, the art of conducting
a conversation is the art of coming to an understanding. Thus,
understanding ultimately turns out to be mutual understanding
and takes place in this communicative context of coming to a
complete understanding with one another. Now it is, I think, a
crucial insight of Plato's, attesting to his wisdom, that dialectic
presupposes good-wi11.
5
The Greek expression for this is eu-
mtnia. Plato uses it to refer to the concrete situation of mutual
1:14 I TIN E1tpressiw Foru of Language
-
-
understanding as opposed to blindly rigorous argument; it is
the intent to come to an understanding that first gives discourse
its true possibility and, so to speak, opens up the way to insight.
This reminder lets us see the new task of rhetoric. It is quite
plain that it requires an art of writing, because all the means
and possibilities of understanding one another that can be mus-
tered in dialogue and conversation must be given up in view of
the dissociation of what is written from what the reader is to
understand. The word "prose" itself indicates this. We can all
agree that nobody would speak of "prose" if there were no verse.
Prose is a hermeneutic concept. The word suggests that there is
still an art of language when a text is not constitutively bound
in metrical feet but walks, as it were, directly along the foot-
path of the thought. Thus the art of prose had in fact already
become a topic of discussion in antiquity. Our main source is
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who described the great writers of
histories-the great historians-as models of style superior to
any of the great speakers, that is, the great speech writers.' Our
concept of style and its refinement stems from this reflection
on the art of writing.
I now turn to the theme that has emerged in our civiliza-
tion, marked as it is by modern science, in reference to writing
clearly and writing well. It is dear that initially modernity was
directly tied to its ancient heritage. Humanism embraced the
ideal of imitatio, the emulation of the rhetorical and stylistic art
of classical antiquity, which viewed Roman and Greek achieve-
ments as almost seamlessly one. A change occurred when book
printing, and the aftermath of the Reformation, ushered in
the beginning of silent reading. This fact is fundamental. To
be sure, the rhetorical continuity with antiquity was preserved,
in Protestant forms of worship, in the art of
ang. But now silent reading came to be a powerful counterpotse.
Into this situation stepped the great revolution of the seven-
The Exprtssiw Forrt of Lang1111gt l rJS

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teenth century. It cannot be denied that the new empirical sci.
ence with its new ideal of method, applying mathematical pro.
jections to nature and natural processes, brought a new tension
into the world between language and knowledge. It is clear-
and one cannot penetrate this question deeply enough-that
at bottom the concept of an empirical science has paradoxical
connotations for the tradition from which our civilization de
veloped. Science that needs only experience in order to be true!
What kind of .,science" is that? Mathematics was the uncon
tested science of antiquity. In mathematics, truth is established
from concepts through thought's own self-development. As
soon as experience comes into it, science can be effective only
in a supporting role. And now modernity turns everything up
side down. To this day, mathematics does not know where it
fits in. It has no place whatever among the natural sciences and
the human sciences. Nor does it claim to have one, though it
knows it is the only uncontested science of reason. But by the
word "science" we now quite self-evidently understand empiri-
cal science. "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge
begins with experience" -so runs the first sentence of the Cri-
tique of Pure Reason? And this becomes the new theme: how
can the new cognitive tasks of modern science be reconciled
with the tradition of cultivation and knowledge that is carried
forward by rhetoric? Clearly this question represents a thus far
unresolved and, I am convinced, also irresolvable tension.
But though this tension sometimes obliges us to study the
art of writing as researchers, it obliges us to it just as inexo-
rably in making our thinking accurate and communicating its
results. To illustrate how this tension still survives, I need only
point out that the rhetorical interpretation of the world still
~ e s everywhere in spite of Galileo and Copernicus. The sun
still always goes down for us (as it so obviously did for pre-
Copernican astronomy). We do not say "the earth turns away."
-
-
This illustrates the way language can detach itself from the sci-
entific ways of explaining phenomena. It can survive in this
separation because it has its own orientation to and aniculation
of the world.
If we consider this fact, we shall at once be clear that lan-
guage must in principle take on new tasks for modern empirical
science. The mathematical model of nature implied that the
laws of free-fall or an inclined plane must be mathematically
formulable regardless of the nature of the falling bodies and the
postulate of concrete observability. As is well known, Galileo
formulated these laws before a vacuum existed, and so before
anyone could have observed what today we see in the class-
room: that in a vacuum a bed-feather falls just as fast as a lead
plate. Precisely by means of this mathematicizing model, he
defined a new concept-the "object" (des Ohjehes, tks Gegm-
standes)-whereas before there was no such word or thing.
"Object" or "Gegenstand" is defined through a "method" that
prescribes how reality gets made into an object. The aim of me-
thodically researching the object in this way is then essentially
to break down the resistance of "objects" and to dominate the
processes of nature; the basic intentions of technology are cer-
tainly not conscious, but they are an immanent consequence of
it, and their reality surrounds us on all sides in the shape of our
technological civilization.
This reality presents a new task for language. Because of the
constructive character of the modern knowledge of nature, lan-
guage has to give up its position of linguistic totality, so to
speak, and limit itself to specific designatory functions. This is
already evident in the beginnings of European science. For ex-
ample, Johannes Lohmann has shown in a beautiful work called
Mwike und Logos (Stuttgart, I970) that certain concepts in
mathematics and geometry are entirely artificial re-coinings of
Words- metaphors, which, modern semantics would say, have

!



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become dead metaphors. The Greek expression for a geometri-
cal angle is gony, but no mathematician thought he was
uknee" because what he was talking about was a new
saymg . .
reality constituted by Euclidean mathematiCS, wh1ch otherwise
did not exist. Thus it was concerned with adequately designat-
ing a welldefined concept, and no longer to do with a "word."
The ideal language of mathematics has in a certain sense re-
duced the function of language to designation, so that we no
longer use language in the way Aristotle had in mind in that
famous definition of what distinguishes man from the animals.
There he says that man has language not so that we can give
signals to one another as birds give one another warning and
mating signals, but in such a way that we have the logos, the
language that consists in dtlun (revealing), in making the real
states of affairs manifest. That means that we do not merely
point to something but also recognize it for what it is.
Now this, clearly, is the lifeworld of language: it is itself
an interpretation of the life-world. This expression-" life
world" (Lthenswtlt)- is one of those rare successful philosophi
cal words. It is an expression of Husserl's that in the last few
decades has, so to speak, found a way into the Germans' sense
of language. In this word the life-world takes cognizance of
itself in opposition to the scientific world of objects defined by
the methodical attainment of knowledge.
Now, this life-world component has patently all along been
at the bottom of what I have designated as the rhetorical tra
dition of antiquity and of the Middle Ages. What rhetoric as
such is based on is a kind of common language, the language
of our common sense, our sensus communis.
8
This can be seen
in the example of Freud's early prose
9
or perhaps Theodor
Mommsen's history of Rome.
10
Both examples belong com
pletely under the rubric of rhetoric. This means that they are
formulated using the values of a universally accepted common
128/The Exprmiw Force of Language
Se
that can be used for describing obiects or events
sen J
they present themselves to the researcher. Yet, the greatness of a
great researcher like Freud, who discovered a new dimension of
depth to the mental, or a great researcher like Mommsen, who
could discern the seeds of nineteenth-century bourgeois cul-
ture in the ancient Roman republic, lies altogether elsewhere.
It should certainly not be forgotten that in Freud's language
there is a significant level of interference between the concepts
he forms and the living force of language: without doubt his
survey of the new dimension of the unconscious is dominated
by particular scientific ways of presenting things, which require
well-defined concepts. Nevertheless, the linguistic context that
surrounds his concepts betrays the fact that he is a master of
scholarly prose. And again, Mommsen, that great researcher, is
obviously fully justified in bringing the rhetorical component
provided by sensus communis into his characterization of his-
torical knowledge. In just this way he reveals, and we discern,
that all of this is continuous with the great historical process
of coming to an understanding in which men try to understand
one another. Here too, the art of coming to an understanding
ultimately remains the crucial component, at least within the
group of sciences that we call the humaniora, and perhaps not
just there. Grammatically, "humaniora" is a comparative form.
This might provoke a great deal of thought, as much about the
positive that makes all science human as about the superlative
that no science can quite attain.
Were I to summarize these considerations, I might begin by
bringing to our attention a few plain and trivial facts: there is,
of course, a language of science. Rhetoric demands that one
know to and for whom one is speaking. It was a great of
Plato's that the use of rhetorical means, rousing the emonons
with moving forms of style and speech, can definitely be used in
the s f Th d ubt best to
erv1ce o acquiring knowledge. us 1t IS no
0
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address any particular circle of research groups in the way that
will enable those research groups to best grasp what is being
communicated. To research is to continue the dialogue by other
means. For this reason, even the most eminent researchers often
prefer publishing a few pages in a journal that change the world
to writing long books. There is a dialogue in the specialist aca-
demic periodicals. What filters through from this dialogue into
the textbooks (which have their own aesthetics and dialectics)
again has its own form of rhetoric that I do not want to over-
look. But it presents the challenge of stopping this kind of sum-
mary of research from entering scientific usage as new dogma.
We can ultimately define a researcher as someone who is famil-
iar with what the textbooks say but does not believe it. That is
a really sound principle. But we are still faced with the task of
developing the specifics of textbook rhetoric so that the provi-
sional nature of our knowledge and our openness to the progress
of research are made effective in the reader's understanding.
The real theme to which this reflection is dedicated, scholarly
prose, certainly means something different. "Scholarly prose"
cannot really be defined as "scientific prose." The expression
"scholarly prose," which sounds a little less refined, reminds
us that now, in the twentieth century, a decided change sepa-
rates us from the culture of the eighteenth century. The young
scholar was also a theme of Gotthold Lessing's, and he cer-
tainly brought out the humor of it.
11
Today it no longer takes
a Lessing to do that. I remember one time when I was ill and
was asked in the clinic what I was, I said: a "scholar." (You can
see from this how strangely confined was the life-world of a
young academic in my own youth.) My medical friends, I be-
lieve, could hardly stop laughing.
The change to which I refer is the linguistic one that has
t ~ place between the eighteenth century's "scholar," the
runeteenth's "researcher," and today's "scientist," a change that
-
sheds a good deal of light on our conception of ourselves. It
is echoed in the antiquated phrase "scholarly prose." This is
not to question the fact, which doubtless cannot be altered if
research is to go forward, that progress always has to choose
the most economical way of communicating knowledge, and
50
of carrying on discussion within research. On the other hand,
whenever one is concerned about having a continuing claim to
intelligibility, the word "scholarly" is a very appropriate label
to use. "Scholarly prose" means that here someone is speak-
ing who has mastered a science and yet is capable of making
himself so intelligible to uneducated (ungelernt) people-un-
educated is the true opposite of
41
SCholarly" (gelehrt)u-that
they learn something. This is an "art" needed in science as well
as in literature. It seems to have its external expression in, for
example, the fact that books (and not just textbooks, those con-
tinuations of the dialogue by another means that constitute the
immanent process of science) are written to indefinite addres-
sees and possible readers, and are written by writers who know
that they have to lead an indeterminate number of people, who
are not participating in the actual classroom dialogue, down
a path toward understanding and penetration into the subject
matter. This necessitates keeping a certain distance from things
that are familiar to us. If we want to speak as scholars and still
be intelligible to the uneducated, we must renew in ourselves
the old virtues of dialectic and rhetoric. The distance involved
here is not to be confused with the distancing that is demanded
by the scientific method, which consists in alienation from a
world of objects and overcoming this alienation by exploration
and scientific explanation. The art of scholarly prose has to do
with another kind of distance-distance from oneself. Its job

15
to achieve a particular kind of mediation between one s ~
knowledgeability and the reader's lacking it. This, it seems, lS
the real essence of scholarly prose-that it consciously takes on





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and exercises this function of mediation. It is not surprising,
then, that it has a much greater scope in the human sciences,
the non-historical social sciences, and the linguistic sciences. It
is enlightening to note that it is not by chance that linguists are
bad stylists. What unnatural reflections about language-as-such
are demanded of them! They are supposed to make language
into an object, rather than the things that are communicated
through language.
We are not primarily oriented toward language in our lives.
Nor are we primarily oriented toward fine language.
We should keep this firmly in mind when thinking about
"scholarly prose" -namely, that what distinguishes scholarly
prose is its being wholly motivated by the things it communi-
cates. We should not be tempted to distinguish between what
is really being said and communicated and the fine "way" it is
said. The great artistic metaphors that we admire in the great
stylists and essayists do not testify as such to the art of scholarly
prose. To use an example: a very precious and elegant passage
from Walter Benjamin makes sense to me because the book in
question is a good one,
0
but not because this phrase as such
is a good example of scholarly prose. It has its rhetorical and
stylistic function. It puts the reader in a particular mood and
perhaps in that way facilitates accepting the research results. It
could be the evocative power of such emotive language that in-
vites Benjamin to use these precious turns of phrase in describ-
ing bourgeois tragic drama from the point of view of its Jesuit
background-! read Benjamin's book a long time ago and am
no expert on it. But without a doubt, that is not the language of
scholarly prose. It is only the first step toward developing one's
own laws of style. Since Plato's Nomoi (Laws), we have known
something about this law of style.
14
But this kind of linguistic
art is to be properly distinguished from concern with the matter
under discussion that is the aim of scholarly prose as a whole.
IJ:l i Tht ~ m s i w Force of LAnguage
-
Certainly we should not forget what an irresolvable tension
there is between modern science's concept of method and the
desire for sympathetic understanding we have as people who
live in the world. Modern science's concept of method demands
that boundaries be set. What is attainable by method defines
what can be an object for exploration. From this, it follows nec-
essarily that research is one particular approach to reality, and
it is for just this reason that pragmatic devices are appropri-
ate to secure this approach-codifications, mathematical sym-
bolisms, artificial logic, or whatever. But I need only mention
these symbolizations to call attention to the fact that not even a
natural researcher can completely communicate what he thinks
by these means alone. He cannot wholly free himself from the
life-world and its linguistic articulation. It is very true that this
can lead to misunderstandings. I remember (I did not really
understand this until today) that my late Heidelberg colleague
and friend Hans Jensen
15
had read a work of mine
16
in which I
said something (and I think, in itself, the right thing) about the
concept of force in Herder and Hegel and its connection with
Newton. He responded, "Yes, but that has nothing in the least
to do with the concept of force in physics." That is precisely the
point. In this instance, a scientific concept of force has become
so dissociated from the concept of force in the mother tongue
with all its evocative power that the use of the word can be a
source of misunderstanding and false simplifications, mislead-
ing apparent understanding, adherence to prejudices, and the
like. In everyday language as well as in the so-called Geistes-
wissenschaften ('human sciences"), everything that increases
speech's rich variety of reference and extends its capacity for
containing knowledge can turn into confusion when everything
depends on univocal denotation. The metaphorical nature of
Ian d c. h use of ar-
. guage makes definition necessary an JUStwes t e
tJficiai terminology. This cannot be introduced by means of
The Expmsiw Foret of l..tlnguagtiiJJ
,


I
'


I
I











.



\
.

'
"

wholly determinate language alone, but only through natural
speech. The comparative particularity of scientific languages as
they dissociate themsdves within the overall phenomenon of
language always stands in tension with the totality that binds
us all together into a human society, our ability to speak, to
seek and find words to communicate.
In honor of Lessing, who is very much in our thoughts this
year,S
7
I conclude with a quotation from him. We know that
Lessing was not exactly a great advocate of mystical, inexact,
or irrational modes of thinking. And yet we find the follow-
ing sentence in a work where he is criticizing someone's overly
one-sided concept of science. Lessing says it is usomething that
dries up the wits and accustoms them to a physical precision
that has nothing in common with the metaphysical precision
of poets and speakers."
I.JI/ TIH ExJn'miw Force of LAnguage
II
Good German
One can only learn from examples. This is an old truth, though
few may welcome it in our age of hurtling Enlightenment,
which takes such pleasure in experiment and construction. This
truth is never so convincing and unavoidable as when we are
dealing with language, with speaking, and with writing. Now,
language certainly seems to be all rules and conventions, and it
might seem that using speech and writing freely and indepen-
dently is possible only by completely mastering all its obligatory
conventions and rules. Where rules reign, though, there can be
no examples.
But there is something peculiar about rules-about the rules
of language, of spelling and punctuation, and perhaps many
others that govern our behavior. Is our behavior really governed
just by the application of rules? Or do they not rather consti-
tute a dead framework of rectitude whose life is revealed to us
in the exceptions, the deviations, and the ventureS beyond what
is correct and regular? Think how hard it is-how unnatural,
even-to render at all explicit the system of rules of one's own
mother tongue. Our language sense is much more at home
with replying, and it perceives rules, even if it upholds and
"follows" them, as an unnecessary abstraction. Grammar may
be very helpful to those learning foreign languages, but even
then it is not the most natural way of learning. Most impor-
tant, what writer, even one with the modest claim to greatness
. speech of acceptance given in Darmstadt in October
1
979 on re-
ceavmg the "Sigmund Freud Prize" from the German Academy for
language and Poetry.
IJS
I

.
I



that we ascribe to a scholar, does not sometimes find that his
style is cramped by the rules of language and grammar, estab-
lished vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation? Who has not lost
the battle against Duden
1
and the copyeditor countless times
b being unwise enough not to risk going beyond them?
y And who really learned to write at school anyway? We re-
'ect its essay style and that frightful translator's German that
~ n tends to make do with for didactic reasons. When we learn
the way we do at school, it is always difficult to preserve what
little room for play is allowed us by the conventions of language
governing our speaking and writing, and in the end we have
to defend ourselves less from these linguistic norms themselves
than from the compulsory stylistic model that our teachers' au-
thority represents. This goes for schools of all levels, including

umvers1t1es.
Or am I talking about a bygone age of authoritarian edu-
cation, and an equally bygone age in which one's sense of
language and perception of style would slowly grow from and
beyond examples, feeding on the treasures of one's own mem-
ory-the German of the Lutheran bible and a rich and artistic
repertoire of poetic language? Has the new ubiquity of the mass
media's oily rhetoric allowed modern man's linguistic imagina-
tion to dry out, especially now that we view learning by heart
as repression?
But no. The antagonism between rhetoric and linguistic cre-
ativity has existed all along. It is as true today as it always was
that you can learn to write only if you feel free (on this we can
surely all agree), and you feel free only if you choose your ex-
amples and models for yourself. How can you even think of
speaking or writing under the illusion that you're the first per-
son ever to speak or write? Everything that language can do,
the forms and arrangements that words allow and the thoughts
IJ6/ Gootl Gtrman
-
-
they invite us to, those "cunning, bird-voiced daughters" (to
quote this year's of the Preis) a-none of this is
stored in a warehouse like raw matenal for some indeterminate
and arbitrary purpose. Instead, it occupies a space in which
there is a constant play back and forth between what has alread
been said and what is still to be said, between choices
made and still to be made. Of course, the poets are boldest
of all, and for the most part we unknowingly follow their ad-
venturous spirit in applying words and turns of phrase. Adopt-
ing models in speaking or writing is not primarily a conscious
choice, since speaking and writing themselves consist, after all,
not so much in choosing words as in following their invita-
tions. Yet language is wise enough to speak of "turns of phrase,,
of trD!Joi-these are paths that language has beaten for itself
which, as such, recommend themselves to new applications. In
this respect, freedom is at the same time both a further solidifi-
cation and a new yielding, a turning away from a former way of
speaking and a turning toward another, new direction of saying.
But this very reliance on ready-made language and adopted
models-as well as the way what has already been said is fol-
lowed in subsequent speech and writing-can, on the other
hand, seduce us into those inaccurate, thoughdess, approxi-
mate things we call "cliches" (&dmsartm), "mere cliches" that
are more or less expressly opposed to careful discourse that
can answer for what it says. This negative, deadening effect of
ready-made language makes itself felt even when we think we
are being productive. For a creative writer, to imitate is to fail
by lapsing into the tone of his models. The
tnfluence of what has already been said and written,
15
especially effective on everyone who speaks in a merdy tmtta
tive way, as we all do when we talk, and everyone does who can
Write hut is not a poet. Still, it does credit to the prose of our
GHtl IJ1



I
'




t
I



.
I
thought that it is wholly dedicated to communicating what it
is thinking, and all its efforts go into bringing out the thought
rather than one's own artistic style.
And so we see the situation of a man of science. He is sup-
posed to write well, but he does not submit to any rigid norm,
be it orthodox correctness, a particular stylistic model, or any
conscious stylistic ideal. There is no fixed norm of scientific
speech and writing. Anyone who has considered the French in
this regard knows that they put greater stock in style and hold
it in much higher esteem than we do. The scholarly prose that
unites narrative histoire naturelle with litttrature, which Buffon
not only demanded but himself exemplified in the eighteenth
century, remained flexible and so was vulnerable to the criti-
cisms of the subsequent generation, who saw him as a par-
lier. Yet the truth he captured in his formula "le style c'est
l'homme"
3
nevertheless transcends all the contingencies of any
particular time. If a scholar's style has not moved beyond all
consideration of models or orthodox correctness, if the art of
his writing does not operate like his own nature, he has no
style, or rather he has not yet attained the freedom to use his
own style.
Seeming natural is certainly itself subject to changing times,
alterations in ideals of taste and in our sensibilities. The style is
the man-but what is the man? Certainly not simply a natu-
ral creature that grows to maturity, but someone who forms or
cultivates himself, from playful imitations to development by
consciously or unconsciously adopting models in speaking and
writing. But there are special limits imposed on the man of
scientific and scholarly prose. What an artist who works with
prose, such as a storyteller, is supposed to do and wants to do, is
to make a certain art of writing into a palpable reality. The pos-
sibility is open to him of formulating his own style, although, as
a style, it will always go unnoticed to some extent. Even a writer
IJB/Gooti ~
...


who is a journalist and essayist has possibilities of this kind and
stands, so to speak, halfway between the poet, for whom a tone
of one's own is everything, and the man of science.
But then what is left for the man of science, the scholar?
The answer is both simple and hard: That indefinable "good
German!" It is an ideal that can hardly be attained by the phi-
losopher. Arthur Schopenhauer's invectives against the Ger-
man philosophers' lack of down-to-earth readability are well-
known, .. and there is probably no reader who does not have
difficulties with the philosophers' German. The elegance and
refinement of Immanuel Kant's language is certainly not to be
criticized, but we must admit that for all the facility and read-
ability that Kant's style lends to particular details, he does place
huge, scarcely fulfillable demands on his reader-especially on
his power of concentration and his capacity to follow the rigor-
ous and striking constructs of a true architect of thought. Who
would dare to take this style as a model for his own? Johann
Fichte's almost showy rhetoric (although his contemporaries
attributed his first work to Kant himself when it was pub-
lished), Friedrich Schelling's charming mixture of dry scholas-
ticism and inspired profundity, or even Hegers quasi-German
with its highly characteristic and unmistakable Swabian ten-
dency to shock-these we might admit are the achievements
of great stylists, but we would hardly want to imitate them. As
we have seen over the decades, or even centuries, in, say, the
many Hegelians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or
in the Heideggerian German of philosophy the wars,
the lecture hall appears to demand Jts bar-
barity, and its special power of suggesnon JS owmg to JUSt that.
M
h
d
t
1
ons under which the various forms of
oreover, t e con J
kno
1 d
lay
a formative role in scholars' styles.
w e ge operate p .
uL ,, d h blication of big, comprehensJVe books are
ectures an t e pu
not all aking the central venues of a natural scien-
, gener y spe '
G(J(N/
I


,


-
tist's work, whereas this very often is the case for "humanists"
and that must have its influence on the prose style of scholariy
writing in these fields.
Academic rhetoric, then, develops its own formative power,
which affects the style of scholarly prose. It may not be easy
for somebody to be a good speaker if he is to stand the test
of everyday academic life. The rhetoric of the political ros-
trum or the pulpit is insufferable in the lecture hall. Conversely,
good academic speakers who speak in parliament tend to sound
as though they are addressing a women's circle. Within the
academic metier, the didactic component will always show
through, even when one is lecturing in an academic setting
about well-styled texts {as Friedrich Gundolf did),
5
and even
when one is perfecdy clear about the stylistic distinction be-
tween good presentation in public speaking and verbal commu-
nication of research results.
In both respects, then, teaching and research clearly exert a
dangerous influence on those who are supposed to write schol-
arly prose: the attentive lecture hall and the esoteric research
circle have little in common with the reader, who needs to be
won over first. So I do not think the question of which models
a scientist should choose from among the masters of science, or
a philosopher from among the masters of his metier, in order
to learn good German, is correctly posed at all.
I will illustrate this point from the history of my own lin-
guistic development: in my day one's first real contact with
verbal art was still in learning Latin and reading the speeches
of Cicero. Construing and translating long sentences requires
to a rule of logical construction over great distances,
and this teaches an initial lesson in taking up distance and
so an initial to one's own usage. How the art
of wntmg and rendenng trains of thought accurately can be

sts" ,
olarly
OWer:
'
: easy
: test
. ros-
:r:sely,
.ound
n the
show
:tting
even
l be-
nmu-
cert a
chol-
earch
to be
odels
:e, or
order
din-
with
:ches

!UJres
nces,
: and
eart
tJlbe
passed on to a younger generation that has not been through
this Jdnd of schooling is, I think, an open question.
The German that was spoken in the middle-class world in
my hometown, Breslau, was fairly free of dialect. In those days
that was considered an advantage, and it was made particu-
larly important at school. But this language certainly lacked
vividness and force, especially as exemplified in the well-to-
do newspapers and journals of those years that came into my
hands, whose style of writing was as artless as it was lifeless.
So it was on the back stairs, in the maid's newspaper, that I
came across Walter and Paul Rilla's theater reviews;' in their
facility and grace I found again something of Gotthold Less-
ing's prose, which I had long admired. The young Hermann
Hesse's polished style or the young Thomas Mann's skillfuJ
wording might also have pushed me in the same direction.
But breaking into philosophy, into the language of Kant and
neo-Kantianism, and the general strain of lifting the concep-
tual load with which one is burdened by philosophical studies,
demanded an even stronger counterbalance. This came to me
above all from the great German lyric poetry that, in my youth,
used to echo through the entire space of the German language.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke,
and Friedrich Holder lin/ whose work was only then beginning
to be ranked as world literature, constantly reminded us of the
evocative power with which language attests to its own free-
dom and sovereignty-and what is better able consistently to
show philosophical ideas their own task (by which I mean the
task of pointing to things that are not there and never have
been there) than the language of poetry?
The tragedy of conceptual thinking was vividly demonstrated
-to one who was only too familiar with it on his own account
-in Holderlin's prose sketches, those endless self-entangled

convolutions of reflection that constantly postpone their goals
conclusions and outcomes, so that in the end one whole pa ;
forms a single gigantic antecedent to which the world it:lf
could not provide a counterbalance sufficient in force and sig
nificance. Nor did the dark pathways where Heidegger, driven
by his questions, beat against the rock of language, lead out
into the daylight of common clarity. I could even admire my
friend Max Kommerell's artistic style
9
without wanting it to
replace the declarative force of conceptual language. I much
preferred to let myself be filled instead by the spirit of light
heartedness for which I found Goethe's prose exemplary, and
which sometimes seemed to recur in Nietzsche and in the
learned variations of Nietzsche's style of that master philolo
gist, my personal friend, Karl Reinhardt.
10
But let me also
mention a living person here: Dolf Sternberger, whose prose
enlightens by the clarity of its simultaneous precision and non
chalance.
11
If my path from school exercises to prose instructed by art
and ruled by conceptual abstraction, yet still readable, has borne
fruit, I have this succession of helpful models to thank. The
German Academy for Language and Poetry appointed me to
its circle in its very first year and now publicly honors me by
associating me with the name of a Sigmund Freud; this might
make me believe I have had some success in finding a balance
between concept and word, between the art of thinking and
teaching and the art of writing. If so, the same might be said
in the humble case of scholarly prose: Ars latet arte sua-art
hides itself through its own art.U
lp/Good Gfflrl4n
'
. "'
ls,
ge
:If
g-
en
Ut
ny
to
ch
lt-
nd
he
o-
so
n-
ut
ne
he
to
by
ht
NOTES
LAb dn- Thtorit is published in German with no notes at all. In spite of
this, Gadamer makes frequent references in all of the essays it contains
to works of German and classical literature and philosophy that will not
necessarily be familiar to an English speaking reader. I have therefore
endeavored to track down the references and include them in these notes.
Gadamer speaks without detailed advanced preparation, and when he
quotes he does so from memory. As a result his quotations are not always
accurate, so I have included the original versions of the texts to which
they refer where these differ from Gadamer's versions.
Gadamer also has a tendency to extract general themes from the cor-
pus of a writer's work, and to refer to these without having any specific
passage exclusively in mind. This is especially ttue in relation to Aristode,
so where I have provided a reference to Aristode in connection with a re-
mark of Gadamer's, it should not be assumed that that is the only passage
he has in mind.
Introduction
I. See his 1947 Rectoral address to the Uruversiry of Leipzig, "On the
Primordialiry of Science," in Applitd Hmnmtutics, rs-u.
2. He makes this suggestion tentatively at first on page 14 of Tlx llka oft&
Good in P/atonic-Aristottlian Philosophy.
J. See "Plato's Unwritten Dialectic," in Di4lofld and Duutic.
4 The importance of Plato's fonn of the beautiful for Gadamer's philo-
sophical account can be seen from the work it does at the very end of
Truth and Mtthotl, 487-8.
I
Culture and the Word
t. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Disro11m on tlx oftht Arts and Sti-
enm {First Disrourst] {I7SO), in Tht Colltttttl Wnhngs of Rousstall, trans.
.....__ _ __ !



Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Kelly, vol. Dis-
the
C',;-w and Arts, and Polemus (Hanover, N.H., Unaversity
(OUTSe on -'""
Press of New England, 1992).
2
Immanuel Kant, Bemtrlungm zu dtn Beo/Jalhtungm iJ/Jn- das Gtfiihl des
Sch4nnr und Erhahtntn, posthumously published from a handwritten
manuscript, in KaniS gesammelte Schrifttn hn-ausgegthtn wn dtr Preuj/ischn,
.Aladtmie dtr WisstnJ(hafttn, vol. 20 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1
942
),
44

. Johann Gottfried Herder, ldttn zur Philosophit dtr Gmhilhlt dn- Mtns(h-
3 /;tit, vol.
2
(1
79
1} (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1965), 38. "Lasset dieses
["Zivilisation eines Yolks") die Srufe einer noch sehr unvoUkommenen
Kulrur sein, sie ist indessen fUr die Kindheit des Menschengeschlechts
notwendig." "Even if this [a people's 'civilization') is the level of a very
incomplete culture, it is still necessary for the childhood of the human
..
race.
4
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Rtprtstnlalion (1819), trans.
E. F. J. Payne-2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications/falcon's Wing
Press, 1958}.
5 Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Re-
produzierbarkeit" in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.1 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). Translated by Harry Zohn as "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 11/uminatiom, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
6. Herder, "Alteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts" in his Wtrlt, vol. s:
Schrifien zum Altm Testament (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1993).
7 Genesis 1. 3
8. Friedrich Holderlin, Friedensftitr ("Festival of Peace"), l.91. The line is
slightly misquoted (Gadamer inserts "k.onnen"). The verse from which it
is taken runs:
Viet hat von Morgen an,
Seit ein Gesprach wir sind und horen voneinander,
Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang.
Und das Zeitbild, das der grolk Geist entfaltet,
Ein Zeichen liegts vor uns, daB. -zwischen ihm und andem
Ein Bundnis zwischen ihm und andern Machten ist.
Man has, from morning on,
Since we are a conversation and hear from one another,
1-1-1 I Notts to Pages :1-J
10
If,
u.
'3
14-
IS.
16.
'7

20.
h but soon we are song.
Mac -r- . h . . r Ids
d the picture of t1me t e great spmt un1o
An h . alli . -'--
L
a sign before us, t at IS an ance 1t m-.g
ays d h
With other powers, between 1t an ot ers.
. d Ebner Das Wort und dit gtistigtn &alitdtm:
9 -#nt# 'vol
1
of his Gtsammtltt Wuh (Vienna: Verlag Herder
tstht rrllgm
01
' I
I9S1), 33
Aristode, Polities, I.2.Il5Jaio.
',:: Cf. Martin Heidegger, Bting and Timt (1926), trans. John Macquarrie
and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), paragraphs 6 and
7
,
. Jr7 and ss-ss. where he explains his rendering of Aristode's phrase
logon t(hon, as the living being that can talk rather than as "rational
animal." Heidegger gives no reference for the phrase, which does not
seem to appear in Aristotle in exactly this form. Aristode's statement that
11
rionality (tou logon echontos) is the distinguishing feature of man is
most clearly stated at Nichomachtan Ethics, I.7.1098at-2o.
u. Aristode, Politics, nsJa8-I8
13. In the original Greek the last three sentences given here are in fact a
single sentence that lasts from the second line to the end of the passage.
14. Op. cit.
15. Aristotle, Dt lnttrprttationt, chapters 1 and 4, x6ax6 and I]ai. "Kala
IJ"Ihtktn" means "by convention." On convention, see page 59
16. The third part of Truth and Mtthod is a more detailed discussion of the
philosophical importance of language.
1
7 "Koil'lt symphuon" means just "useful in common to all."
'
8
Gadamer is referring to the passage he already quoted above, where the
has "to sympheron kai to blaberon, hoste kai to dikaion kai to adi-
kon" (of what is helpful and what is harmful and so also of what is right
and what is wrong).
'9 Nomos "Ia " d . "Ari d ' d :.c:
Ia .... s w an synthtlt means "convention. sto e 1 entwes
u a convention at Politics, u8obxo, and applies this to language at
toe be
ao L gmnmg of De Interpretatione.
Eudt
G k Ethus, 1.1.UlObi-J, where Aristode suggests that the
w .. word from which "ethics" is has its origins in the
a
1
Pia or Bor, which means "habit "
to fl.._
u ...... l'uh/u, 2.J68-J71
. 37ads. It is actual! G
l), Set p Y laucon who makes the comment.
age 16.

.
.



14
For more detail on Gadamer's central notion of "the beautiful," see Tht
Rtltwmu oftht Btautiful, 14 tf.
25
. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusmlan Disputations, 2.5.13: "Ut ager quamvis
fertilis sine cultura fructuosus esse non potest, sic sine doctrina n i ~
mus .... Cultura autem animi philosophia est." (Just as a field, however
fertile it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, the same is
true of the mind without teaching ... But the cultivation of the mind is
philosophy.)
26. I.e., Aristotle in the passage quoted earlier.
27. See Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of
Human Culturt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), chapter
2

Gadamer himself makes use of the notion of a symbol in Tht Rtlt11ance of
tht Btautiful, 31-32 and in Truth and Mtthod, 72- 73.
28. A more detailed explanation of Gadamer's understanding of "tradition"
can be found in Truth and Mtthod, 180-183.
19. See page 89.
30. Author of the Tao-It-ching, and founder of Taoism.
31. Gadamer sees the "dialectic of question and answer" as the fundamental
mode of operation not only of philosophy but of language and under-
standing themselves. See Truth and Mtthod, 362-379.
31. Our word "planet" comes from the Greek word planaomai, which means
to wander.
33 Eduard Morike, "Auf cine Lampe" ("On a Lamp"):
Noch unverriickt, o scht>ne Lampe, schmuckest du,
An leichten Ketten zierlich aufgehangen bier,
Die Decke des nun fast vergeBnen Lustgemachs.
Auf deiner weiBen Marmorschale, deren Rand
Der Efeukranz von goldengrunem Erz umflicht,
Schlingt frt>hlich eine Kinderschar den Ringelreihn.
Wie reizend alles! Lachend und ein sanfter Geist
Des Emstes doch ergossen urn die ganze Form:
Ein Kunstgebild der echten Art. Wer achtet sein?
Was aber scht>n ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst.
0 lamp so beautiful, unmoved you still adorn
n;e wall, suspended daintily on your light chains,
0
this almost forgotten but once pleasant room.
On your white marble shell, around the edge of which
I
An ivy wreath of golden-greenish ore is bound,
Some children, tripping in a merry circle, dance.
How charming it all is! A tender spirit pours
Out, laughing yet in earnest still, round the whole form:
An artwork of the proper kind. Who'U notice it?
What's beautiful, though, shines as if blessed in itsel
34
This sentence contains a reference to Hegel's dialectic. The two German
words I have included both derive from the verb aujhehm, which Hegel
uses for the dialectical unification of opposite moments: Aujhehung has
been variously translated as "synthesis," "sublation," "transcension," and
"cancellation." The difficulty is that the word is used in two senses at
once: it means both canceling out and raising to a higher level.
2
Praise of Theory
1. "Metic" was the name given to a resident of a Greek city who was not
born there and therefore did not have the full rights of citizenship.
2. Gadamer analyzes "play" in great detail in Truth and Method, IOI-no,
and in The Rtlt'Vanu of the Beautiful, 22-25 and I2.J-I.JO.
3 IUnt, Oher den Gemtinspruch: Das mag in dtr Theone richtig sein, taugt
ahtr ni,ht for die Praxis, 179.3 (Frankfun-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
1968).
4 Plato, Rtpuh/i,, 7514-518.
5 See Gadamer's analysis of Bildung in Truth and Method, 9-19, and also
p. 121 of this volume.
6. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1.I.I094ii, trans. W. D. Ross and]. 0.
Unnson, revised by J. Barnes (Revised Oxford Aristotle, 1984). This
translation is a fairly literal one, but Gadamer's translation into German
is very free. It reads more like "All efforts of knowing, ability and choice
have to do with the good."
7 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.98oar.
8. Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), Natural History (ro vols.), tranS.
H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heine.mmn,
19.38 and 1949).
9 In St. Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo De Vera Rtligione, chapters
-49-52. This work is not euy to find in English translation.
1o. See page 1.
- \.
C
-.,
.
--
n. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, Being Part
Thrtt of the Enrydopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (I8Jo), trans. William
Wallace, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 291-315.
11
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Gmnan Ideology (1845-r6) Pan 1-
Ar, trans. W. Lough, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965),
43
_
45
.
13
. Thomas Mann, Buddtnhrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901), trans. H. T.
Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1914). Mann's first novel charts
the epic tale of a merchant family's fall from grace amid changes in the
society of the nineteenth century.
14
. See especially The World as Will and Rtpmtntation Book 4 63, 355-
1
.
Schopenhauer makes a comparison between Kant's distinction between a
phenomenal world and the things-in-themselves and the doctrine that all
human cognition is illusory or behind a "veil of maya." See The Thirtun
Principal Upanishads, trans. Robert Ernest Hume (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1911): the doctrine of maya is in the Svetasvatara Upanishad
49-IO, 404, cf. 38. Schopenhauer also argues that the transmigration of
souls and ultimate promise of Nirvana is the popular version of the sages'
philosophical view of the unity of all being beyond individual phenomenal
experience. These views, and the ultimate possibility of fusing with "the
All" are expressed in the Maitri Upanishad (esp. pp. 437 and 458).
15. Oswald Spengler, The Dttline of the West (1917), an abridged version, trans.
C. F. Atkinson (London: George, Allen and Unwin 1961). The original,
Drr Untrrgang des A bend/andes: Umrisst einer Morphologie der Wtltge-
schichte, is in two volumes (Munich: C. H. Beck). A useful brief summary
of some of the ideas in the book can be found in Spengler's Man and
Ttchnics (London: European Book Society, 1991).
16. For a description of what Gadamer understands by "Neo-Kantianism,"
see his description of the thinking of Paul Natorp in Philosophical Appren-
tiuships, 2.1-26.
17. See Chapter 1, note 1, p. 143.
18. Da.uin means "existence" or "being-there." I have left it in German be-
cause it is used in a technical sense by Heidegger, and occasionally by
?adamer himself, especially in his early work Plato's Dialectical Ethi(l. It
ss not synonymous with "consciousness" because whereas that term im
plies a distinct entity that tries to understand or assimilate a world around
it (as in Descartes), Heidegger used the term "Dasein" to suggest that on
the contrary we are always already part of, and involved in, the world.
19. ?adamer's discussion of "prejudice" as a precondition of all understand
mg, ~ d of !.he possibility of overturning prejudices by means of a "fusion
of honzons can be found in Trut L and M th .J
q t Ou, :t71-J07
1-18/ Nottsto Pagts :IJ-JI

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20
Augustine, De Ci'Vilale Dei Contra Paganos (417-426), 11,
25
(para. C),
rrans. Gerald G. Walsh and Mother Grace Monahan in Writings of Saint
Augustine Volume 7 (City of God) (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University Press of America, 1952), 227: "I know that we ought to say that
a person enjoys what he produces, but merely makes use of practice. The
point of this distinction seems to be that a thing enjoyed (.frui) is related
directly to ourselves and not to something else, whereas a thing used (uti)
is sought as a means to some other end."
21
. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1.981b22-24.
21
This is supposedly established during the discussion in &puhlit 4-
4
35-
442.
23- For more on this, see Reason in the Age of Sdtnte, 74-5.
24. See The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristoltlian Philosophy. especially
Chapter 5
25. I.e., Aristotle .
26. Aristotle, Ni,homachean EthiCJ, 10.] . 1177 a19-b26.
27. Aristotle, Metaphysiu, 12.9.I0]4bzs-J+
28. The reference here is to Aristotle's characterization of the imperish-
able human soul at De Anima, 1.4.408b25: "!Vli to noein dt k.ai to theorein
marainetai a/lou tinos eso phtheiromenou, auto de apathes tstin.""And think-
ing and contemplation (to noein ui to theortin) are only quenched by
the death of some other thing that they are within, and are themselves
unaffected." Gadamer takes this description of the soul to concern "wit-
nessing" and "involvement" -his sense of "theoria" -rather than isolated
consciousness. He may also be gesturing here toward a possible etymo-
logical connection between the Greek words "theoria" and thtos (God).
2
9 The reference is to Aristotle's Ni,homa,htan Ethics ro.] . U]]V.O, but this
is not quite what Aristotle says, let alone something that he "stresses." He
says: "Kratiste It gar haute {theorein} estin he energti4. ""For it [contempla-
tion] is the highest form of activity." But he has distinguished thtoria as
one of three kinds of energeia, the others being poilsis and praxis, and he
docs not relax his distinction between theory and practice in saying that
theory is an activity.
3
The Power of Reason
r. "Practical or political science."
2. Aristotle, Ni,homa(hean Ethi(J, 33uubu and 32-33
J. Gadamer uses two different words in this book that I have translated as
...
\"; t.:' ------------------------
- . .


.
I
"rationality," and there is a stark contrast between them.
is the "reasonableness, that derives from Gadamer's notion of practical
reason, while Rationa/i/41 (first used on the last page of this chapter) is
the dominant "rationality" of modem society that Gadamer detects in the
word "rationalization." I have marked each occurrence of "rationality"
in my translation with its German original, except where it is obvious I
which sense is intended. More on Gadamer's conception of rationality
can be found in his essay "Historical Transformations of Reason," but
as that essay was originally published in English it does not explain the
distinction between the two German words.
4
. Christiaan Huygens, Horologium Oscillatorium (and De Vi Cmtrifoga).
The Pmdulum Clock, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Ames: Iowa State Uni-
versity Press, 1986). Galileo Galilei, 1Wo New Scimm, trans. Sillman
Drake (University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).
5
Rene Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch (London: J. M.
1
Dent [Everyman], 1912).
6. Plato, Gorgias, 461d-465b and soob-soxb.
1 See Gadamer's essay on "The Limitations of the Expert" in Applied
Hermmeutics, 181- 191.
8. Poetry is, presumably, included in the parody of universal legislation at
Statesman, 199d-e.
9 Heraclitus, Diels-Kranz fragment number 44, from Diogenes Laertius,
Liws of Eminmt Philosophm, 9.1.2: "Machesthai chre ton demon huper
tou nomou [huper tou ginomenou] hokos huper teicheos., "It is necessary
for the common people to fight for the law [for what has come about]
in the same way as for the city wall." There is some evidence that nomos
("law") still had the interpretation Gadamer suggests for HeraclituS, al-
though some scholars (e.g., M. Marcovich Hn-aclitus (Merida, Vene-zuela:
Los Andes University Press, 1967), 9
4
) take it to mean "law" as in the
constitution of a city. The first, basic, meaning of the word offered in
Liddell. Scott's Lexicon is "that which is in habitual practice, use or
and they quote Heraclitus fragment
114
("all human laws are
nounshed by one law, the divine law") as an instance of nomos meaning
"usage or custom." Charles Kahn offers a reading more compatible with
in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge
Umvemty Press, 1979), 117-118 and 179-181.
10. Qyintus Aurelius Symmachus &lation O S k ( d )
.. .s, J.xo, m tto eec e .
Q. Quae Supmunt (Berlin: Weidmann, 188)/1961), 2h
m R. H. Barrow (ed) p .r. . .r
and Emperor: The Relattonts DJ

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SymmadJus A.D. 38.1 with Translation and Notes (Oxford: Cbrendon,
1973>
..
The Ideal of Practical Philosophy
1
Gadamer has paid a good deal of attention to the status of the Gtistes-
wissmschafttn. See the beginning of Truth and Method (3-9) and the
essays "Truth in the Human Sciences" and "Practical Philosophy as a
Model of the Human Sciences."
2. John Stuart Mill, A Systtm of ugic, and lnductiw (1872),
Co!lecttd 7-8 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I97J-1974).
3 Sextus Empiricus, Pros Dogmatilous and Pros Mathtmatihus. Sextus
actually questioned logic, physics, ethics, literary scholarship, rhetoric,
geometry, arithmetic, astrology, and music. He was skeptical about all
branches of )earning, and had plenty to say about the "great domain of
speaking and writing well" in the first book of Pros Mathtmatil.ous, which
is called Pros Grammatil.ous, even if he does not specifically mention what
we now call history
.f. Plutarch, Liflts of tht Noblt Grtrians and &mans, trans. Dryden (London:
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1990).
S Thucydides, Tht History of tht Ptloponnman War. trans. Rex Warner
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954).
6. Moritz Schlick, "On the Foundation of Knowledge" (1934) in his Philo-
sophical Papers Volume 11 (191J-19J6} (Dordtecht: Reidel, 1979), 370-J87.
Schlick rejects a correspondence theory of uuth in favor of a coherence
theory, emphasizing that all scientific statements, including so-called
"protocol-" or observation-statements, are hypotheses. As such, the5e
statements cannot found science but instead play a role in the satisfaction
of predictions, establishing the coherence of the scientific theory rather
than the correspondence of scientific generalization to a Pbtonic "rea.l.iry"
external to science.
7 Max Weber, Tht Methodology of tht Soria/ Srit'lltts, trans. A. Shils and
Heruy A. Finch (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1949}.
8. On hermeneutics, see Gadamer's essay "The Universaliry of the Henne-
neutic Problem" in Philosophical Hmnmtulics, J-I7, and also Truth
11
nJ
Method, a6s-
379
. . .
9 Wilhelm Oil they, Dtr Aufoa
11
dtr gtuhuhtlifhm Wtlt m dm
0
Gnstuwusm-
schafttn, in his Gtsammeltt SciJriftm. vol. 7 (Leipzig &. Berlin: B. G .

,r






Teubner, 1917), 146-t51. Gadamer makes this claim about Dilthey's a _
propriation of Hegel's doctrine of objective Spirit in more detail in
and Mtthod, 118-131.
10
. See Dilthey, Dit Enlstthung dtr Hmnentutill (1900) and Ltbtn Schltin--
tnllchm (1870), in his GtSammtllt Schriften, vol. S (Leipzig & Berlin: B. G.
Teubner, 1914) and vol. 13, (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1970
),
respectively.
u. Edmund Husser}, Tht Crisis of Europtan Scienus and Transundtntal Pht-
nomtnology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1970), Part IliA (1937).
u. In Bting and Timt. This actual phrase appears in that book in a footnote
(490, I.3.note i) where Heidegger refers the reader back to his earlier
lectures. An example of the concept in those lectures can be found in
vol. 61 of his Gtsamtausga/Jt (his 1911/1 lectures on Aristotle) (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1985), 187-8.
13. Aristotle, Mttaphysics, 6.1.1015b1s: "hoste ei pasa dianoia e praktike
e poietike e theoretike, he phusike theoretike tis a eie," "Insofar as all
thinking is either practical, creative, or theoretical, natural science is
theoretical." Poitsis, the Greek word from which "poetry" is derived, just
means "making" or "doing."
14. Gadamer discusses this importance of human finitude in his criticism of
Dilthey's position in Truth and Mtthod, 131-136 and 357-358.
15. Aristotle, Nichomachtan Ethics, 1.7.1098b1 ff. (Gadamer's own note)
16. See Chapter 1, note 10, p. 145
17. Max Weber, "The Nature of Social Action" from Economy and Socitty
{1910, first published posthumously in 1911). In Max Wt/Jtr: Stltclions in
Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 18. Weber
divides behavior into four kinds: rational means-end behavior, ratio-
nal principled or value-promoting behavior, emotional behavior, and
traditional behavior.
18. Aristotle, Nichomachtan Ethics 1.1.109533 ff. (Gadamer's own note).
19. 1 have retained the abbreviated ending from the version of this essay in
Lob dn- Thtorit. The longer version, written for a book of essays on the
work ofTheodor Litt, concludes from this point as follows:
"Here Aristotdian thought takes a path of its own which, if I am
is modd for our own thinking about human knowledge and
h1stonctty. To follow Aristotle is not to start from a general concept of
sc1ence and then look at the various different kinds of human knowledge,
but to that transmits this knowledge and so
to ground tt m tts true ortgm, the reality of human society. It is not just
rpl Noles lo Pagts
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matter of showing the central position of language and linguistic me-
in philosophical or, say, social scientific theory, but precisely also
of making explicit the normative implications of the things that language
mediates.
''This comes as no surprise. Dilthey's admirable enterprise of a Cri-
tique of Historical Reason was marked and, as we perceive today, also
hindered by the model of experimental scientific method. His resistance
to the neo-Kantian theory of value (Rickert) may well have been right,
of course. But his mere opposition to it certainly had to be overcome, and
this is what Theodor Litt tried to do. In 1941, when I had just become the
youngest member of the Saxon Science Academy in Leipzig, I heard Litt
give a lecture there on 'Universals in the Structure of Human-Scientific
Knowledge' which seemed to me to compound the position he had al-
ready worked out in a lovely book in 1930, which was a synthesis between
Kant and Herder. He said that language bridged the gap between univer-
sals and individual particulars, and this certainly came dose to my own
attempt to use Heidegger's ontological critique of Greek metaphysics and
the modern subjectivity-based thinking that it engendered to improve
the self-understanding of the human sciences. Today I still find some
proximity to Litt, for example in his defense of everyday language against
the construction of 'pure' concepts and terminology that is fully justified
only in the natural sciences. Litt learned to articulate his own thinking
in terms of Hegel's dialectic of universal and particular and the fusion of
determinant and reflective judgment: this touched the hermeneutic nerve.
I tried myself to go beyond the horizon of modern philosophy of science
and the human sciences to display the hermeneutic problem in humanity's
fundamental linguisticality. In the end phronesis, the Aristotelian virtue
of rationality, is the basic hermeneutic virtue. I formed my own ideas on
this model. Thus hermeneutics as the theory of application, i.e. of bring-
ing the universal and the individual together-became, for me, a central
philosophical task.
"Theodor Litt would probably oppose my attempts at thinking by say-
ing that a philosophical justification of the human sciences on the model
of Aristotelian phronesis would have to admit to positing an a priori that
was more than just the result of empirical it always
a misunderstanding to see the principle of Amtode s practical philoso-
phy as the 'that' without recognizing that as philosophy-and thus as a
desire for theoretical knowledge-it couldn't itseif depend on those de-
ments of experience that it encounters as a concrete fultiJlment of ethos or
practically effected reason. Thus Litt would insist on the transcendental
Noltllo Algt 6r I ISJ

l
reflection that was also pursued by Husser I and even by the Heidegger of
Being and Time. But even if this is better than an empiricist or inducti .
theory, it seemed to me (and it still does) that it overlooks the fact
living practice provides this kind of reflection with the foundations and
limits which it can sometimes rise above. This insight is not available to a
reflection that takes the idealist step up to 'Spirit' ( Thus in the end
I still think it's right for one's thinking about the good in human life to
set its own limits with the kind of Aristotelian caution that, perhaps with
Plato, righdy forces philosophical ideas-which are certainly more than
mere empirical generalizations- to remain tied to their own finitude and
to finitude as we experience it in our own historical relativity."
Cf. Heinrich Rickert, The Limits ofConupt Formation in Natural Sri-
tnu (1901), trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 115-136. Rickert argues that values are intrinsic to both human
and natural sciences, but that the formal concept of value is itself objec-
tive, since, as it is fundamental to the will, it underlies all attempt.s to
gain knowledge of any kind. On this basis he aims to go beyond Kant
in promoting history to the same level of rigorous objectivity as natural

sctence.
Theodor Litt, Kant und Hndn als Dmtn dn Geistigen Welt (Leipzig,
1930).
Theodor Litt, Das im Aufoau dn geisteswissens,haftli,htn
Erkenntnis (1941) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1980).
s
Science and the Public Sphere
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t. The best source on Wilhelm von Humboldt in English, which also gives
an excellent background to the history of the conception of Bildung, is
Paul R. Sweet's two-volume work von Humboldt: A Biography
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978 and 1980). 1
1. Gadamer's "Notes on Planning for the Future" in .Applied
tus, 165-180.
3 See Gadamcr's discussion of "judgment" in Truth and 30-34
4 Gadamer explains his idea of experience, and his distinction between
Erlebnis and Erfahrung in Truth and
70
and
346
_
361
. I
S Hegel, Phtnommologyo[Spirit (18o
7
), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1977), n8 "Work, on the other hand is desire held in check, I
fleetingness staved off." '
6. Charles Secondat, Baron de Montcsquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (I]48),
'
IS-II Notttlo Pagts 6
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uans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), 9.6, ISI. "When the
le stative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the
gJ h b libc ..
same body of magastratcs, t ere can e no ny.
P
lato D#hu/Jiic, 7520e-sub.
7 '"'r .
S. Aristotle, Metaphysus, I.I.98oa1.
9
. Gadamer is presumably referring to The PhmommologyofSpirit, 298-1
99
(where Bildung is translated as "culture"), but it is not easy to recognize
precisely this idea in Hegel's text.
10
Thales of Miletus was one of the "seven sages," and is indeed thought of
as the first "philosopher." Diogenes Laertius, in the first chapter of his
Lives of Eminml Philosophn-s, trans. R. D. Hicks (London: Heinemann
[Loeb], 1950), however, tells this story rather differently: "It is said that
once, when he was taken out of doors by an old woman in order that he
might observe the stars, he fell into a ditch, and his cry for help drew
from the old woman the retort, 'How can you expect to know all about
the heavens, Thales, when you cannot even see what is just before your
1.'. )' ..
1eet. I.J41-4
6
Science as an Instrument of Enlightenment
I. Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightmmmtt, trans. Lewis White Beck (Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1950), VIII, 35- 41: "Enlightenment is man's
release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make
use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-inCUJ'1'ed
is this tutelage when its cause lies not in Jack of reason but in lack of
resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.
aude!'Have the courage to use your own reason!'-that is the motto of
enlightenment." The phrase "sapere au de" itself is from Horace, An
poetica.
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to p()fJ)tr, uans. Walter !Uufmann and
R. ]. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 94-95 tf.
(posthumously published writings from the r88os).
3 Jacob Burckhardt, The Cifliliution oftht &1111issanu in Italy, trans.
S. C. C. Middlemore (London: Allen & Unwin, 1911). See also N. Nelson
"Individualism as a Criterion of the Renaissance" Jourlllll of English and
Gn-manir Philosophy 31, 1933, Jr6-JJ4
Descartes, A Disrourse on trans. John Veitch (London: J. M.
Dent [Everyman], 1912). . . .
S Descartes, Meditations on the First Phtlosophy. published an the same book.
----- 1
,---------------------------------------------
\

6. Descartes, Discourse on Method, V, 44-46.
7
. Kant, Critiqut of ~ d g t m m t (1790 ), part 2 "Critique of Teleological
Judgement," trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon,
1952
).
8. See Kant, Critique of Practical Rtason and Other Writings in Moral Phi-
losophy. trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1949).
9 Descartes never published a work on ethics, although some of his !etten
were gathered together with extracts from the third section of the Passions
of tht Soul after his death, and published under the title Ethiu in Mttho-
dum tt Compendium (London: W. Davies, t68s). These letters can now be
found in Dmartts: His Moral Philosophy and Psychology, ed. John J. Blom
(Hassocks: Harvester, 1978). Gadamer's claim here can be assessed in the
light of a few sentences from Blom's introduction, xvi-xviii:
"Descartes assigned a perfected philosophy, and the moral autonomy it
implies, only to God . . Moreover, Descartes knew that the responsible
application of the sciences requires an understanding of the metaphysi-
cal structure and purpose of man -of the causes that lay hold on man,
his powers of self-determination, the kinds of realities to which he can
relate, and the solidity of the enjoyments he may take in them .... On
[Descartes'] metaphysical picture hinged his more detailed discussion
of 'virtue', which he defined as the correct reasoning that should guide
our practice. On that same picture likewise depended his conception of
the humane application of the sciences . . . He also insisted that man's
nervous system makes it more difficult for some to thwart their passions
or even to acquire the knowledge needed for truly virtuous or voluntary
action. He left no doubt that without a study of the body there could be
no solid moral philosophy and psychology- no finished morale."
Hence Descartes' ethics is provisional only in that it cannot be com-
plete until we have a complete picture of the physical workings of the
human body and the metaphysical status of man's free will: he certainly
thought that his method could be applied to those questions, even if he
believed that the complete picture itself (required for ethics) could be
reached only by God.
10. Compare Rtason in lht Agt ofSdtnu, 78-So, where Gadamer talks of
the work of the critical theorists (such as Habermas) as "emancipatory
reflection" and goes on to analyu the notion of "utopia "
n. Aristotle, Dt Anima, J.s.
43
aa
1
, '
12. See Gadamcr's writings on this topic in Tht Enigma of Health.
1j6/ Notu to Pagts 78-8
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J,
7
The Idea of Tolerance 1782-1982
D
tr Haus!Ja/1-tint dtulscht Nationai-Gmhichlt was printed by Von Tratt-
nern in Vienna in 1781, and claimed only to be by "v-." It appears in
vol.
5
of Gotlhts Wnkt, ed. Friedrich StrehJke (Berlin: Gustav Hempel),
1
6
9
-175, and was also reprinted in an extended version, without the intro-
duction to which Gadamer refers, by Carl Konegen in Vienna in r883.
The introduction runs like this (I include the German because the text is
so rare):
"Die neusten literarischen Nachrichten aus der Hauptstadt unseres
Vaterlandes versichern alJe einmuthigJich, daB daselbst die Mergen-
rothe des schonsten Tages einzubrechen anfange, und ob wir gleich uns
ziemlich entfernt von jenen Gegenden befinden, so sind wir doch auch
geneigt, ebendasselbe zu glauben. Denn gewill, es kann eine Schaar von
wilden Sonnenverehrern nicht mit einer groBeren Inbrunst, mit einem
gewaltsameren Jauchzen und durch alle Glieder laufenden Entziicken die
Ankunft der Himmelstonigin begriiBen, als unsre Wiener, freilich auf
eine gleichfalls robe Art, die ersten Strahlen einer gesegneten Regierung
Joseph des II. verehren. Wir w\lnschen ihm und ihnen den schOnsten
Tag; die gegenwiirtigen AugenbJicke aber gleichen jenen Stunden des
Morgens, wo aus allen Tiefen und von allen Bachen aussteigende Nebel
die nachste Ankunft der Sonne verkundigen."
"The latest literary notices from the capital city of our Fatherland all
unanimously assert that the morning blush of the most beautiful day is
beginning to break there; and if we immediately find ourselves to be fairly
remote from those parts, we are still inclined also to believe the same
thing. For surely a sect of savage sun-worshippers could not welcome the
arrival of the goddess who tints the sky with a greater ardor, with a more
violent jubilation and rapture running through all irs members, than r that
with which] our Vienna, admittedly in a similarly crude way, worships
the first rays of Joseph II's blessed reign. We wish him and his the most
beautiful day; but the present moments are like those hours of the morn-
ing that herald the next appearance of the sun from out of depths and
through all the fog that comes off the brooks." .
2. The doctrine that the bread and wine used in Communson actually
become the body and the blood of Christ. .
3 Benedict de Spinoza, Traaatus Thtologko-Poli/i(IIJ, trans. Samuel Shtrley
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989).
NDtts ID Prlgts ~ B s l 'Sl
/
r ~ ~





4
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan der Wtiu (1779), trans. E. K. Corbett
as Lessing's Nathan tht Wist (London: Kegan Paul, Trench&. Co.,
188
)
This edition contains an explaining th.e controversy. Th/piay
is set in Jerusalem at the t1me of the crusades, and 1ts hero, Nathan, is a
Jew. Nathan, Saladin, and a young Templar, whom Saladin has spared
because he reminds him of his brother and who has then rescued Nathan's
daughter from a fire, all express repeatedly the view that one can be truly
good and pious only in overlooking the dogmatic details of one's own
religion and treating everybody with love and understanding.
S Hermann Lubbe, Philosophit na(h der Aufol4rung (Dusseldorf/Vienna:
Econ, 1980), 214. Lubbe also makes a general point about the imponance
of the Row of trade in opposition to Gadamer's theory of understanding
in his Gts(hi(h/shtgriff und Gmhi(h/sintermt (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe &
Co, 1977), 227-230.
6. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Don Kar/os: the only recent
translation I have found is by James Maxwell (Birmingham: Oberon
Books, 1987). Carlos is the Spanish Infant (heir to the throne), and the
woman he loves and to whom he was briefly betrothed has married his
father, the King. Spain is currendy putting down a revolt in Flanders,
where Carlos, the new Qyeen, and their friend the Marquis of Posa all
studied together and developed ideals of freedom. Posa endeavors to
make the King see the value in sending Carlos to Flanders to quell the
revolt without mass slaughter: the last scene of Act One is of particular
relevance here .
7 The text of Mozart's Tht Magi( Flutt is by Emanuel Schikaneder, and
there is a translation by Adrian Mitchell (London: Glen Freebairn and
Associates, 1966). Sarastro is at first thought to be an evil tyrant who has
kidnapped an innocent girl, but turns out to be a thoroughly wise and
enlightened king, slandered by superstition and rumor, who rules over
initiates who hold him in the highest regard. The words of his aria:
In diesen heil'gen Hallen
Kennt man die Rache nicht!
Und ist ein Mensch gefallen
Fiihrt Liebe ihn zur Pflicht.
Dann wandelt er an Freundes Hand
Vergnugt und frob ins bessre Land.
ln diesen heil'gen Mauern
Wo Mensch den Menschen liebt-
Kann kein Vemter lauern
lj8/ Notu to Pagu 86-IIJ
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.
Weil man dem Freund vergibt.
Wen solche Lehren nicht erfreun,
Verdienet nicht ein Mensch zu sein.
Within these holy walls
Revenge is quite unknown!
When there's a man who falls
Love brings him to his own.
Then, glad and sated, hand in hand,
He strolls into a better land.
Within these holy walls
Where all by love must live-
Betrayal never calls
Because we all forgive.
And he who doesn't like this plan
Does not deserve to be a man
8. Kant, &ligion Within tht Limits of &ason Alont (J79J), trans. Theodore
M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (La Salle: Open Coun, 1934 and 1960).
9 For Gadamer's notion of ("effective history" or "the
history of influence") see Truth and Method. JOO-J07.
ro. "Who owns the territory dictates the religion."
u. For the importance Gadamer accords to conversation, and especially
to "proper conversation" (eigmtliche Gesprtkh), see Truth and Method,
JsS-36
9
.
12. Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon: see TIN Political
Thought of Saint- Simon, trans. and ed., Ghita lonescu (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976).
1
3 Gadamer also urges the need to promote solidarity in &ason in tht Agt of
Science, Bs-s
7
.
1
4 Nietzsche, The Will to
rs. Max Weber, Parlament und Regierung im neugttnrlnttm Deutschlant/(1918),
in his Gesammelte politischt Schriften (fubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul
Siebeck), 1958) 3rd edition, 1971, JJ0-.3.3.3
r6. See page 108.
1
7 Especially in Socrates' speeches from soa onward. . . .
18. Max Weber, als Beruj(l919), in his Gesammtllt pclthscht &hriflm,
Jrd edition (TUbingen: J. c. B. Mohr (Paul Siebcck], 1971), 546-SSI
19. ln act
3

7
, Nathan wins the respect of Sahd.in by telling the fol-
lowing story. A man has a magical ring that makes people love hun, and
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leaves it in his will to his best-loved son, ordaining that it should alwa
be passed on to the son its bearer loves best. Generations later, the o!r
of the ring has three sons he loves equally and promises it individually to
each of them. Unwilling to break his promises he has two copies made:
after his death the sons wrangle over which was the real ring. They appeal
to a judge who points out the rings are a sign of their father's equal love
for all of them, that it is impossible to tell the real one except by which I
ring-bearer is most loved (the supposed result of its magical power), and
that they should therefore each believe their own ring to be the true one
and love the other two. This is explicitly interpreted as an analogy for
God's giving Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to man.
8
Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation
I. The whole book of Job concerns anger against God and humanity. Christ's
agony is related in Matthew 26.30-46, Mark 14.26-42, and Luke 22.39-46.
2. Matthew 27.46: "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice,
saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?" Also at Mark IS34
3 Euripides, Htltn, s6o HELENE: o thtoi! thtos gar kai to gignosktin philous.
HELEN (on recognizing Menelaus): 0 gods! For god is the recognizing
of friends .
+ Friedrich Holderlin, On &ligion (c. 1797), trans. Thomas Pfau in his edi-
tion of Holder lin's Essays and Lmm on Thtory (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1988), 92-93: "And hence everyone would have his
own god to the extent that everyone has his own sphere in which he works
and which he experiences, and only to the extent that several men have a
common sphere in which they work and suffer humanely, that is, elevated
above basic needs, only to that extent do they have a common divinity;
and if there exists a sphere in which they all exist simultaneously and to
which they bear a relation of more than basic needs, then, and only to that
extent do they all have a common divinity."
S Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhtlm Mtislm Lthrjarht, 2.13, in
Goethe's Uiorken, vol. 7 (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1950
_
19
68), 137 Transla-
tion by H. M. Waidson available as "Wilhelm Meister's Years of Appren-
ticeship" (London: J. Calder, 1977- 1979), no-
121
The whole song:
Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt,
Ach! der in bald allein;
J6o/NottS.Io Pages
97
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Ein jeder lebt, ein jeder liebr,
Und ihn seiner Pein.
Ja! mich meiner Qyal!
Und kann ich nur einmal
Recht einsam sein,
Dann bin ich nicht allein.
Es schlechr ein Liebender lauschend sachr
Ob seine Freundin allein? '
So iiberschleicht bei Tag und Nachr
Mich Einsamen die Pein

Mich Einsamen die Qyal.
Ach werd' ich erst einmal
Einsam im Grabe sein,
Da laBt sie mich allein!
Who devotes himself to solitude
Alas, is soon alone;
Other people live and love,
And leave him with his pain.
Yes, leave me my suffering!
H 1 can only once again
Find real solitude,
Then 1 am not alone.
A lover always bums to know
1f his lover is on her own.
Thus over me by njght and day creeps
The solitude of pain,
The solirude of suffering.
But once I can be
Alone in my grave,
Then it will leave me alone!
6. Nietzsche, Thus urathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Hannonds-
worth: Penguin, 1961).
7 Schiller, On duration of Man: in 11 stria of (Oxford:
Clarendon, r7). Especially letters l-5

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8. Marx, Capital(1867), trans. Samuel Moore and Dr. Aveling, ed. Fried-
rich Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1954
)
(6 volumes).
9 See Gada mer's essay on "Culture and Media ...
10
. Kant, Tht Mttaphysi(S of Morals (1797) 2.:1.2.47, 472, trans. Mary Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The reference is to this
passage where Kant quotes Juvenal's phrase from Satires 2.6.165:
"The necessary combination of qualities is seldom found in one person
(rara 01Jis in InTis, nigroqut simmilima rygno), especially since the closest
friendship requires that a judicious and trusted friend be also bound not
to share the secrets entrusted to him with anyone else, no matter how
reliable he thinks him, without explicit permission to do so.
"This (merely moral friendship) is not just an ideal but (like black
swans) actually exists here and there in its perfection ......
u. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 8 and 9
n . One of the earliest written occurrences of this maxim is in Plato's Phu-
drus, 279c5.
13. Plato, Rtpuhlic, 4, especially 434e.
14. Hegel, uctures on the History of Philosophy (184o), trans. E. S. Haldane
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trilbner and Co Ltd, 1892), vol. 1, 152:
"Philosophy is being at home with self, just like the homeliness of the
Greek; it is man's being at home in his mind, at home with himself." The
phrase Gadarner actually uses (Sich-Einhausen) does not appear in Hegel.
15. Hegel, The PhenomenologyofSpiril, chapter 3
9
Man and His Hand in Modem Civilization
1. Gadamer may have in mind section 14 of Nietzsche's The Antichrist,
where Nietuche talks of man losing the instinctive certainty of animals.
See the translation by H. L. Mencken (Costa Mesa, California, 198o), 59
2. Arnold Gehlen, Zur SysttmatiA der Anthropologie (1
94
2), partS See his
Gtsamtausgahe, vol. 4, 85-87 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
198J).
3 Aristotle, Dt Anima, J.8.4JUt.
4 See Chapter 8, note 7
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10
The Expressive Force of Language
r. See especially Philosqphical Hmntneulits, 20-26 and RtiiJon in the Age of
Sdmu, n8-I37
,_ Philip Melanchthon, Elemtntorum Rhetorim, which, although originally
published in three books (ISI9), appears in its later two-book version
(ISJI) in the collection of the writings of the Reformation thinkers edited
by Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider under the title Corpus R.tformatum.
It is found in vol. 13, Philippi Melanthonis Opera Quat Supmunt Omnia
Volumm Xlll (Halis Saxonum: Schwetschke & Son, 1846), 416-so6.
3 Plato, GorgiiU, 462d-465b and soob-sorb and Phaedrus, 268a-269c. The
Phaedrus passage implies that rhetoric, in the sense of a knowledge of
how to construct well-balanced speeches, is a necessary pre-requisite for
dialectical inquiry into the truth, but it remains wholly disparaging of the
claim that rhetoric might of itself be able to reach or display interesting
truths of any kind.
4 Gadamer explains his understanding of "dialectic," and the distinction
between Plato's notion and Hegel's (he never refers to Marx's or Same's),
in Dialogue and Dialectu and Hegel's Dialtctic. See also Chapter 7 note u.
S Gadamer uses the notion of "good-will" in his reply to Derrida: "Good-
Will to Power" in Dialogut and DeconsfrU(ti'on (see bibliognphy under
"Text and Interpretation"}.
6. In his lost treatise On Imitation, the substance of which is recounted in his
Lt11er to Gnaeus Pomptius, 3-5. See Dionysius of Halicamassus, Tht Criti-
cal Essays, vol. 2, trans. Stephen Usher (London: William Heinemann
(Loeb), 1985) J]O-J99
1 Kant, Criti9ue of Purt Reason (r]8I and 1787}, uans. Norman Kemp Smith
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1929}, 41 (Br).
8. Gadamer discusses smsus communis in Truth and Mttlxu/, 19-30.
9 The classic example would be Sigmund Freud, Tht Inttrprttalion
Drtams (
1900
), trans. A. A. Brill (London: George Allen & UnWlll Ltd.
19IJ}.
10 Theodor Mommsen, Tht History of &mt, rrans. William P. Dickson
(London: Bentley, ra-1966). . n:l
u. Translations of Lessing's comedies an: comparat1vdy e-
vant example (Dtr is translated as "The Frcethmker m Thrtt
C
.. .J R J J Holroyd (Colchester: W. Totham, r8J8)
trans. ev. . .
12. As opposed to ungtlthrt, which means "illiterate."
- ---/ -:-.\ ---- -.. - ...------- ----- -


13
. Walter Benjamin, Unprung des deutuhen Trauenspiels (1915) in his Gesam-
melte &hriften, 1.1 Wrankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). Translated by
John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB,
1977>
14
. Perhaps Gadamer is not being entirely serious here, because at Laws
7
.8nc-d, Plato recommends legislation to the effect that all poetry and
writing to be permitted in the state should emulate the style (and content)
of his own dialogues. He has no recommendations about specific ways of
using words to create a desired effect, beyond stipulations concerning the
moral messages they may convey.
IS Probably Hans Detlef Jensen, author of Altarmenische Chmtomathie
(1964) and Die Schrift in VtTgangenheit und Gegenwart (1935).
16. Hegel's Dialectic, 41-43.
17. The 15oth anniversary of his birth.
II
Good German
1. The name of the standard German dictionary.
1. In 1979, the Georg-Buchner-Preis (awarded by the German Academy for
Language and Poetry) was won by Ernst Meister, a friend of Gadamer's
who died that year, for his selected poems Ausgewllhlte Gedichte 19.]2-1979
(Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1979). The line Gadamer quotes, "listigen
TOc:hter, die vogelgestimmten," does not, however, appear in that volume.
Gadamcr has written three pieces about Meister's poetry: "Ernst Meister,
Gedenken V" (1977), "Gedicht und Gesprach: Oberlegungen zu einer
Tc:xtprobe Ernst Meisters" (1988), and "Denken im Gedicht" (1990).
None of these has been translated into English, but they are all available
in vol. 9 ofGadamer's Gesammelte WtTke (Tubingen: JCB Mohr [Paul
Siebeck], 1993).
3 Comte de Buffon: "Ces choses sont hors de l'homme, le style est l'homme
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Discours sur It Style (an address given to the
on 15 August 1753).
+ Schopenhauer, The World as Will and &presentation vol. 1, 121-126.
S See Friedrich Gundolf's BeitriJge zur LittTatur- und Gtisltsgtsehichte (Hei-
delberg: Lamben Schneider, 1980) or his book on Goethe (Berlin: Bondi,
1914).
6. The theater reviews of Paul Rilla have been published in book form under
the title Theaterkritikm (Berlin: Henschclverlag,
1978
).
7 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a playwright especially noted for his German
to Pag11 IJ:I-I-II
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5
of Greek tnagedies, Stefan George, poet, Rainer Maria Rilke,
vers1on
author of the Duino Eltgits and the Son ntis o Orphtus, and Friedrich
Holderlin, prolific poet and author of Hypmon.
s. The best example is the first sentence of Holderlin's essay On lht Opmz-
Jiqns of Jht Pot lie Spirit (r8oo ), trans. Thomas Pfau in his edition of
H6lderlin
1
S Essays and Ltlln-s on Thtory (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1988), 62-64. The sentence begins "Once the poet is in control
of the spirit," and two pages later it ends, "once he has realized all this,
then he is only concerned with the receptivity of the subject matter to the
ideal content and the ideal form."
9 See, for example, Max Kommerell, Dn- Dichln- als Flihrn- in dn- dtutschm
K/assii (1928) (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1942).
10. See Karl Reinhardt, Sophodts (1953), trans. Hazel Harvey and David
Harvey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979) .
11. See Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of lht Nintlttnlh Ctntury (1938), tranS.
Joachim Neugroschel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977)
u. Publius Ovidius Naso, Mtlamorphosts 10.252: "ars adeo latet arte sua." ,:- ~ ~ :
.
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Apodeixis
Aporia
Aufheben
Bildung
Contemplatio
Dasein
Delun
Energeia
Eudaimonia
Eumenia
Gegenstand
GLOSSARY
Greek
Greek
Latin
German
Greek
Greek
Greek
Greek
Conclusive proof.
A puzzle or being at a loss. Plato's
early dialogues end in aporia when
it is realized that no conclusion an
be reached.
To cancel out and so to nise to a
higher IC\-el (Hegel). In more
normal usage, to get beyond some-
thing.
Cultivation, up-bringing, culture, edi-
fication (Rony). Bilden means to
form-
Contemplation, Gadamer's Latin
translation of the Greek thcoria.
Existence, being-there (Heidegge:r).
Revealing (what something is).
Activity.
Happiness.
Good-will.
Object. German also uses the word
Objckt.
Geiateswiuenschaften German
The human sciences. Roughly equiva-
lent to what we would call the
humanities and social sciences.
\ ---- - -- .. -- -
-- - -- - - - - -
=


.
Hermeneutics
Katon
Kata syntheken
Koine sympheron
Leben swelt
Leidensdruck
Logos
Mathemata
Mythos
Neugier
Nomos
Paideia
Philia
Phronesis
Poiesi&
Greek
Greek
Greek
German
German
Greek
Greek
Greek
German
Greek
Greek
Greek
Greek
Greek
Interpretation theory. The idea that
an individual's understanding is
central to all knowledge.
Beautiful.
By convention.
Useful in common to all.
Life-world (HusserJ).
Pressure of suffering.
Conventionally translated "reason."
Gadamer emphasizes its etymo-
logical connection with word and
language.
Things that are learned.
Myth, legend.
Curiosity. Literally, greed for novelty.
Law.
Education, up-bringing.
Friendship.
Practical wisdom.
Making, construction: composition of
poetry.
Praxis
Greek&.
Practice.
Prohairesis
Protreptic
Rational obligation
(rationale Sachzwang)
Sapere aude
Sensus communis
German
Greek
Latin
Latin
Choice.
Writings that promote the theoretical
examination of life.
The inevitability of events that are
determined by rationalization.
Dare to know.
Sense of community, communal good
sense.
168 I Glossary
specuJatio
Syntheke
Theoria
Vemanftigkeit
Wissenschaft
Latin Speculation, reflection. Gadamer em-
phasizes its etymological derivation
from speculum, a mirror.
Greek Convention.
Greek Theory, contemplation, witnessing.
German Rationality, but in the sense of reason-
ableness, being sensible, as opposed
to rationalizing.
German Science.
Gloumyl r6f)
------ - ---- - ---- ---- .. .. ______ , ___ .,._
I


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gadamer in English
The following is a selective rather than a comprehensive list. See Etsuro
Makita's Gadamtr-Bihliographit. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994-
Applitd Htrmmtutics (Hans-Gtorg Gadamtr on Pottry, Edwation and His-
tory). Eds. D. Misgeld and G. Nicholson. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1992.
"Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time." Tht Southmr of Phi-
losophy 8 (4) 341-354, 1970.
"The Conffict of Interpretations." In R. Bruzina and B. Wtltshire (eds.}.
Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 198:.
"The Continuity of History and the Existential Moment." Philosophy
Today 16 (3/4) 230-240, 1972.
"Culture and Media." In A. Honneth (ed}. Culturai-Politicallnttrflmlions
in tht Unfinished Project of Enlightmmml. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1992.
Dilllogue and Dialtctic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Tht Enigma of Htalth. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995
Htgel's Dialtclic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Htideggtr's Ways. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994
"Hermeneutics and Social Science." CultiiTIII HmnmtuJiu 2 (2) 37-J66,
1
975
"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion." In G. Sh2piro and A. Sica (eds.).
Htrmtneu/i(S: Qutstions 111Ui Prospet/s. Amherst: University of Massa-
chusetts Press, 1984.
"H' al'Ii r f "InT. Geracts (ed.). Proem/mgt of
tstortc rans,ormauons o ...., . .
the lnltT7111/io1141 Symposium (Ill Riz/iq1Uliity TtXIay. Ottawa: UmversJty
of Ottawa Press, 1979 . "
"The History of Concepts and the Language of Philosophy.
ti(l114/ Studits in z8 (J)
1
-
16

1
9
86

. . ,
"ii. -- - - ------ -
- - .- . .. - . - - .. .. ......... ... . -

The Idea Djthe Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. New Haven: Yale
University Press, .1986.
Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1994
"Natural Science and Hermeneutics: The Concept of Nature in Ancient
Philosophy." In J. Cleary (ed.). Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium
in Ancient Philosophy, vol. r. Lanham: University Press of America,
1986.
"On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics." In R. Beiner and W. Booth
(eds.). Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993
Philosophical Apprenticeships. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.
Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Plato's Dialectical Ethics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
"Practical Philosophy as a Model of the Human Sciences." &search in
Phenomenology (9) 74-85, 1980.
"The Problem of Historical Consciousness." In P. Rabinow and W. Sulli-
van (eds.). lnttrpretifle S()(ia/ Scimu: A &adtr. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979.
&ason in the Age of Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981.
The &lt'CJance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
"Text and Interpretation." In D. Michelfelder and R. Palmer (eds.). Dia-
logue and Deconstruction: the Gadamtr-Dtrrida Encounter. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1989.
Truth and Mdhod (2nd edition with revised translation). London: Sheed
and Ward, 1989.
"Truth in the Human Sciences." In B. R. Wachterhauser (ed.). Her-
meneutics and Truth. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press,
1994
"What Is Truth?" In Wachterhauser (ed). Hermeneutics and Truth. Evans-
ton, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Further Reading
Bernstein, Richard J. Bryond Ohjectiflism and &latiflism: Science, Htrmt-
neutics and Praxis. Oxford: Blackwell,
19
8
3

---. Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode. Philadelphia:
Umvemty of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
Caputo, John D. &dical HtrmeneUJiu: Repetition, Deconstruction and the
rp I Bibliography


Htrmmeulic Projtct. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1987.
Foster, Michael. Gadamu and Practical Philosqphy. Atlanta: Scholan
Press, 1991.
Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Philosophical Hmnmelllia. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995
Hekman, Susan. and the Sociology of Knowledge. Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.
Hollinger, Robert (ed.). Hmnmeutia and Praxis. Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1985.
Ricoeur, Paul. Hummeutia and the Human Sdnuts. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1981.
Silverman, Hugh J. (ed.). Gadamu and Hmnmflllits: Scimu, Culture,
Littrature. London: Routledge, 1991.
Simpson, Evan (ed.). Anti-Foundationalism and Practical &asoning.
Edmonton: Academic Publishing and Printing, 1987.
Smith, P. Christopher. Hummeutics and Human Finitude: T(J'U)Ilrds a
Theory of Ethical Understanding. New York: Fordham University
1991.
Sullivan, Robert R. Political Hmnmeutia: The Early Thinling of Hans-
Georg Gadamer. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1989.
Yattimo, Gianni. The End of Modmtity: Nihilism and Hermmtlllits in
Post-Modmt Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
Wachterhauser, Brice R. (ed.). Hermeneutics and Modmt Philosophy.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986.
---. and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1994.
Warnke, Georgia. Gadamu: Hermmeutia, Tradition and &ason. Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 1987.
Weinsheimer, Joel C. Philosophical Htrmmeutia and Littrllry T&ory. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Wright, IUthleen (ed.). Festiwls of Interpretation: Essays on Hans-Georg
Gada me-'s Wori. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Bi6/iogrrzpby/ 1"/J




-
INDEX
Abiding, 103
Adaptation, 81, 93, 96
Administration: key term, xxxv;
training for, 19; as over-rational-
ization, 42, 47, 93-94; and
scientific research, 43, 64-65,
69; demands of, 82, I07j in
legislative bodies, 95
Agreement, 7 Stt also Convention
Albanian legends, n
Alienation, 14-15, 27, 104. Set also
Self -alienation
All-one, the, 26
Ambrose, St., u
Ameria, 98
Animals, 10, 78, 114-117, 128
Answering, s, 135
Anthropology, 3, 33-34, 66, us
Anti-social behavior, 112
Appearances, xii
Appliation, 61, 153
A priori, 153
Aristotle: on human rationality,
4-6, 20, 40, s6-s7. 67, 128, 1
53
;
on convention and meaning,
7; on ethics, 8, 34, 58, no; on
theory and practice, 19, 33,
35
;
on curiosity, 21; Physics, 34; on
theology, 35; on education, 40,
59-60; on knowledge:, 56, 67,
152n19; on facticity, s8; on the
hand, So, u6; mentioned, xv
f
._
.
Art, xxiv, xxvii, 2, J, 26, 56, 68, 121
Astronomy, 72
Atheism, u, 89
Athens, 16, 44
Aufoehung, 15, 25, 30. Stt also
Hegd
Augustine, St., xix, 22, 32
Author's intention, xxvii
Autobiography, SS
Autocracy, 47
Bacon, Francis, 42
Balance: between theory and prac-
tice, xxxiv, 19, 68, 121; between
instinct and intellect, XXXV, US-
n8; in writing style, xxxvii,
142; between state intervention
and free market, 95 Set also
Equilibrium
Beautiful, the: and humanity, ix,
69, 105, u6; and science, x, J2,
73; as self-evident truth, xH; and
the Good in Plato, xxvi; nature
of, 9, 14; "fine arts," 68; obliges
use of judgment, 121
Being, xiii
Being-for-itself, 29
Belief compulsion, 108
Benjamin, Walter, 2, 132
Betti, Emilio, xxi
Bildung: need for, xxxv-xxxvi, 40,
n4; definitions of, to, 18-19,

68
,
119
, ni; alienation from,
27
; characteristic of human
sciences, SI; of the senses,
n8; and writing, 138. s ~ also
Cultiwtion; Culture
Biology, So
Boston College, xxi
Bourgeoisie, 2, S6, 90
Brentano, Franz, :w
Breslau, Silesia, xx, 141
Buifon, Comte de, 13S
Burckhardt, Jacob, 75
Bureaucracy, viii, 47, 69, So, 91, 94,
95, 119. See also Administration
Calculation, 41, 64-65, S2, uS, 119
Cars, 91
Cartesianism, 27
Cassirer, Ernst, 10
Catherine the Great, S4
Catholicism, S4
Cause, 76-77, 101
Cave, Plato's allegory of the, 18
Censorship, 97
Challenges, uo
China, 89
Choice, 8, 66, us. See also PrrJ-
hairesis
Christ, I02
Christianity: word made flesh, xi;
as culture, 3, u; and Enlighten-
ment, J, 74, Bs; commandment
of love, 9; promise offorgivc-
ness and reconciliation, 14-15;
divened reverence away from
world, 21; end of, 75 89; soli-
tude of prayer, 104 s ~ also
God; Religion
Church, the, u, 37 8.4
Cicero, 9 140
__ ...,/.
Civilization, 2, 37, 52, 6o, 82-83,
109, 119
Class, 74, 90, to6
Cliche, I37
Cold War, 28, 42
Communication, 6
Communality/Community: need
for, xili, xxxiii, 7 109, I22;
sources of, xxv, IS, 99, III-112,
121; definitions of, 58, 95, 102,
III; universal, 61. See also Smsus

communu
Compromise, .xxxiii, 38, 64
Compulsion, 107
Concepts, 127-128, 133
Conceptual analysis, xxvili
Conformism, 92-93, n2
Consciousness, 35, S1, 1oS, 109,
II2-IIJ
Consensus, 93
Constitution, s6
Consumerism, 108
Contemplation, 2I, 34
Control, vii
Convention, 7, 59, 135
Conversation: fusion of horizons
in, xxiv, xxx; between world
religions, u, 89; killed by medd,
91, roB; definition, 124. Set aisfl
Dialectic; Dialogue
Cookery, 124
Copernicus. 72 127
Creation, 3
Creativity. 136
Crucifixion. rs
Cultiwtion, xviii, 35 40, 68. See
also Bildung
Cultural critique. xxix-xxxi, 27, 40
Culture: definition of, 1. 6, 9; un-
easine" about, 2, 96; no first



Culture (continued)
step in choosing, 8; in society,
15
,
50
, 90; distinctive of human

spmt, 34, 54, 114
Curiosity, 12, 21, 32
Cybernetics, 8o-81
Dauin, xiii, 20, 30, 35 ss. s8
Davidson, Donald, xvi
Death, u, 15, 34
Democracy, 63, 74 95 108, 122
Denotation, 127-128, 133
Dennda,Jacques,xv
Descartes, Rene, xv, 41, 77-78
Desires, 33
Dialectic, xxvi, 67, 112-113, 124,
131, 153
Dialogue, s6, 130. Stt also Conver-
sation
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 54, 153
Dionysius of Halicamassus, 125
Distance from self; brought by
bnguage, xxix, 6, to; basis of
theory, 10, 67; in Pbto's guard-
ians, 67; necessary for research,
68; required for cultivation, 11o;

m wmang, 131, 140
Distribution of goods, 31
Dogmatism, xxxiii, 49, 58
Domination of nature; effect on
world, vii, 88; result of modem
research, viii, 41, ss-s6, 12.7;
technology as, xxxiv, 76-n;
effect on individual, n7
Drives, human, 34, 37
Ebner, Ferdinand, 4, 6
Ecology, xxx.iv, 8o
Economics, 37 CJO, 95. 108
Education: aims of, 9, 6
9
,
119
,
no; classical heritage,
1
6,
1
s,
40; and the state, 63; value of
traditional, 136, 140-141
Egypt, ancient, 17, 33
Emancipatory utopia, viii, xxxiv,
79-80
Embodiment, xi
Ends, 68
Enlightenment; new one needed,
viii, xxxiv, 83; pride in reason, 1,
24, 37i response to religion, 3
85; free-thinking, 61, 71, 86; his-
tory of, 71-83, 84, 86, 91; of the
twentieth century, 74 89-90, 135
Epistemology, 27, 53
Equilibrium; instinctive and intel-
lectual, xxxv, n6-u7; political,
18, 67; arising from rational
obligation, 43i maintaining, 81;
upset by rationalization, 117. Stt
also Balance; Compromise
Ethics: ethos, xiv, 8, sS, 153; com-
munal and practical, 7, 58, S9i
Kantian, 6o, 79; non-empirical,
6o, 153
Euclid, 128
Eudaimonia, 41. See also Good;
Happiness
Euripides, 102
Evolution, ns
Examples, 135
Existence, vii
Experience; empirical science,
39, 72, u6; of life, 53, 66, no;
cannot found ethics, 153
Expens: social reliance on, viii,
xxxvi, 43-44, 75, 9Si panel not
to be completed by philoso-
1]61/ndtJt

s

I

--

unrestrained by practtcal ratto-
nality,
57
; researchers as, 62
Fact, xxvii, 31, 53, 54 58
Facticity, xiii, 55 Stt also Finitude
Faith, 14-15, 37, ss, s9
Feedback, So-81
Festival, xxv
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 139
Final Causes, 76
Finitude: key term, xxvii; com-
plete understanding impossible,
12, 55, 81, 153; revealed in rec-
onciliation, 14; recognition of
allows practical rationality, 48,
sS; overlooked by Dilthey, 55
Flexibility, 82
Force, 133
Forgiveness, 14
Formalism, 6o
Forms, Platonic, xii, xxv
Forsaking, 102
Foucault, Michel, xv
Foundation, 154
Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, xx.i
Freedom: key term, xxxv; orga-
nized free time, to; political,
37, So, 86; for play in art and
science, 68, 106, u6, IJ6, 140;
definitions of, 79, u2, 122; bour-
geois, in the Enlightenment, 86;
as arbitrariness, is an illusion,
91; individuals' univenallack of
in rationalized society, , 107,
J09,117iOfspeech,97-98
Frege, Gottlob, xv
Freiburg, Germany, XX
French Revolution, 74 87
Freud, Sigmund, 128-129, 142
Friedrich II, king of Prussia, 84, 97
Friendship, 102, no-n3 passim
Function, individual's in rational-
ized system, x:xxiv, 95, , 99,
106, II7
Funding for research, xxxiv, 26, 65
Fusion of horizons, xvi, xxiv
Gadamer, Hans-Georg: philo-
sophical project, vii; technique,
xvi-xvii, xxxi, xxxvii; biography
and anecdotes, xix-xxii, Ss, 130,
1.33, 140-142; on Plato, xxv-
xxvii; on hermeneutic under-
standing, xxviii; and Theodor
Litt, 153
-Truth and Mtthod: on incar-
nation, xi; described, xvii, xxi,
xxiii; on method, xxii, xxxiv;

on convenat1on, XXJV, xxx; on
theory, x:xv; summarized, x:xvU;
on language, xxix, xxxvi
-other works: Plato's Dillltdi<l
Ethics, xvii, xx;
Apprmtimhips, xix; Htgtl's Dill-
lttti(, xxi; Praist ofThtory, xxii;
&ason in tht Agt ofSdmu, xxiii;
Tht oftht Btautiful.
xxiv, XXV
Galileo, 23, 41, 51, 76, 127
Gehlen, Arnold, us
GtisttJWisstnsdJilftm. Stt Human
Sciences
Generations, 91, 109
George,Stefan,xx,96, 141
Gesture, 14
Goals, 59
God: creation, 3; and man, u, 34
1 Nltx / rn

God (continued)
102; defined, 20, 35, 102; object
of contemplation, 21-22; poly-
theistic, 21, 105i and science, 2J,
J9i in the Enlightenment, 23,
76, 78; the Trinity, 85. Stt also
Christianity; Religion
Goethe, JohaM Wolfgang von,
xxi, 15, 17, 84, 103, 142
Good, the, xxvi, 7 17-18, 19, 34.
154
Goods, 6, 32
Good-will, 114
Gorgias, 73
Grammar, 135
Greeks, ancient: developed sci-
ence, 11, 33, 37, so, 71, 101; cus-
tom of eulogy, 16; importance of
friendship, 110; Humanist view
of, ns; Heidegger's critique of,
153
Gundolf, Friedrich, 140
Habennas, Jtirgen, xv, xvi, xxi,

XXJX, XXXJV
Hamann, Richard, xx
Hand,the,8o,116,118
Happiness, 20, 34
Hartmann, Nicolai, xx
Health, 26, 30
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fried-
rich: master and servant, xxxv,
112-n3; synthesis of spirit, 25;
influence, 54, 153; on work, 66;
on Bildung, 68; being at home
with oneself, n2; concept of
force, IJJi writing style, 139;
mentioned, xv
Heidegger, Martin: henneneutica
of facticity, xi, xxviii, ss; taught
Gadamer, xx; writing style,
139
,
142; critique of subjectivity-
based thinking, 153; Bting and
Timt, 154; mentioned, xv
Heidelberg, Germany, xxii, IOJ
Heraclitus, 17, 48
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 2, J,
24
,
133
Hermeneutics: of facticity, xi, ss;
Gadamer's model, xxiii, 61, ISJi
defined, xxviii; and concept of
fact, 31, 53; reconstruction of

meamng, 123
Hesiod, 71
Hesse, Hermann, 141
Historicism, xxvii
Historicity, rs2n19. Stt also Fac-
ticity; Finitude
History, xviii, xxvii, 39, 52, 54, 56,
ns, 154
Hitler, Adolf, xxi
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 141
Holdcrlin, Friedrich, J, 102, 141,
142
Homer, 22,71
Human. Stt Mankind
Humaniora, 51, 54-55, 129
Humanism, n, 25, 125
Human sciences: not methodi-
cal, viii, xxxiii, 56, 133; self-
understanding of, so, 153; u
"moral sciences," 51, 6o; episte-
mology of, 53
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 62
Hume, David, 39
Husserl, Edmund, xx, 55, 128, 154
Huygens, Christiaan, 41
ldealism,24-2S, 27,J7,154
Ideology critique, 27
r;8/INkx


.
0
'

Incamauon, vu, X1
Indian wisdom, z6, 89
Individuality, z6
Industrialization, %8, 64, 8%, 90, 91,
114
Information, ro8
Inquisition, 94-95, 99
Instinct, 9, 114, u6-n7
Intelligence, 119
lntersubjectivity, 29
Intimacy, 29-30, 104
Islam, 85, 90
Isolation, 6, 91, 101, 105, no
Jaspers, Karl, vii, xi
Jensen, Hans, 133
Jews, 86
Job (Old Testament), 102
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor,
84
Judgment: needed in modern
society, viii, 66, 83, 121-uz;
weakened by modern society,
xxxvi, 46, 93, 95, ni-Ju; and
science, 39, 43, 46; and practi-
cal rationality, 57; as cultivated
instinct, 119; and taste, llO, 121;
Hegel on, 153
Ka/on, to. Su Beautiful
Kant, Immanuel: on taste, xili;
on ethics, l , 24, 6o, 78- 79; on
theory and practice, 17; Cri-
tique of Purt &asrm, 24, 39 126;
thought continued by Schopen-
hauer, 26; on Enlightenment,
71; on cause, 78-79; on religion,
87; translated into Latin, 87; on
friendship, uo; writing style,
IJ9 I4Ii mentioned, xv, 83
..
-------------- - 1/
I --

Kepler, Johannes, 72
Knowledge: uses of, vii, 23; as par-
ticipation, ix, s6; has implied re-
search since the Enlightenment,
12, 23, 76; sopMn, 16; desired
by all, 20; sources of, 25, I5%-
'53nl9i knowability of human
affairs, 51; and hermeneutics, 54
Kommerell, Max, 142
Labor, division of, 25, ros, 117. ~
a/so Work
Language: presents all that is,
xiii, n6, ISJ; key term, xxviii;
distinguishes humanity, xxxi.i,
J, S 153; as symbolization, xo;
and community, zo, 46, 153; of
the hands, u6; expressive and
scientific, u7-u8, 133, 153; not

our pnmary onentatJon, 132;
rules of, 135; and play, 137
Lao-Tse, u
Latin, 9, u, u, 87, 140
Law: human, and solidarity, 8,
42t 48, 51, 93t of natute, 42, so;
legislation and justice, 43-44, 95
Learning, 135
Lecturing, 139
Legend, xili, n, 13. &t llisD Poetry
Uidmsdrwi, 109-no
Leipzig, Germany, xxi
Leopold 11, Holy Roman Em-
peror, S,.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 86,
97 IJ0,1.}41 14I
Liberalilm, 109
Life-world, vii, 55 uS, IJJ
Linguistics, 132
Literary aesthetics, 124
Litt, Theodor, 153
.. ~ - - ---
- . .... - - ~ -

Logic, J8, 52, 125, IJJ
Logos, xi, xiii, 4, 20, 128
Lohmann,Johannes, 127
Love, 9, IOJ
Lubbe, Hermann, 86
Mankind: possibilities and dan-
gers, viu, 10, 79; distance from
immediacy and necessity, ix,
xxix, 6, us; has the logos,
xxxii, 4-5, 128, 15.3; conflicting
nature, XXXV, I, 20, 66, II4-115;
in society, 9, 34-35 ro6; self-
destructive, ro, 28, 38; steward
of the earth, 81; universal slavery
of, II7
Mann,1nhomas,2s, 141
Marburg, Germany, xx
Marx, Karl, xxxv, 25, 106, 109
Master and servant, xxxv, 106, 107,
II2-UJ, II7
Mathematics: science of pure
reason, 20, 38, so, 72, 126;
importance, 46; applied to ob-
servation, 76; artificial concepts,
128
Meaning, xxxii, 4, 7
Mechanics, 41, 76, 8o, 127
Media: rhetoric of 44, 136; weak-
ens judgment, 91, 95, ro8, 114
Medicine: nature of, 6, 30; as
model, 20, 43, 81, 82; investment
in, 6s
Meditation, 26
Meinster, Ernst, 137
Melanchthon, Philip, 123-124
Memory, n
Metaphor, 127-128
Metaphysics, xii, 73 77 153
Meteorology, 51
Method: applied to human sci-
ences, viii, ix; and theory, xxiv,
41, 126; history of concept,
23
,
77 153; self-understanding of
science, 28-29, 133; requires
objectification, sr, 127
Mill, John Stuart, 51
Mindfbody problem, 78
Miracles, 85
Models, 136
Modernity, 75-76
Mommsen, 1nheodor, 128-129
Montesquieu, Baron de, 67
Morality, sr, 97, us. See also Ethics
Moral sciences. See Human sci-
ences
Morike, Eduard, 14
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 87
Mythos,13
Nationalism, 74
Natorp, Paul, xx
Nature, s. 103
Needs, 33, to8
Neo-Kantianism, 27, 54, 141, 153
Newton, Isaac, 72, 133
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 75, 94,
104, us, 142
Nuclear energy, 38, 64
Number, xxvi
Objectification, viii, 29, 127
Objectivity, s6, 68
Observation, 53
Old age, t6, 103
Ontology, 153
Other, the, 15, 2
9
,
35
,
9
8
PaiJtia, 9, 16-17,
44
Participation, ix,
31
,
4
6, s6, 6o
r8ol l t U i ~ x
~
Patriarchalism. 94
Philosophy: different kinds of, xv.
20

57
103; scope and method-
ology. xviii. 37 48. 57, 101. 154;
history of, xxxii. u. 16. 20. 27,
103; writing style of German
philosophers. 139; and poetry,
141
Phrontsis. Stt Rationality. practical
Planets. 12
Planning. 43, 64. 93-94
Plato: Gadamer's reading. xii,
xxiii. xxv-xxvii; and poetry.
r, 132; Repuh/i(, 8, r8, 19. 33.
40, 67, 69. rn; participation
in political life. r6. 17, 19, 96;
on rhetoric, 43. 44, 124; on as-
tronomy and mathematics, 72;
philosophy based in finitude,
154i mentioned, xv, xix
Play. u6. 117. 136, 137
Pleasure, 26
Pliny the Elder. 22
Plutarch. 52
Poetry. xiii, 13, 57 134, 136. 137. 141
Politeness, 98
Politics: limiting abuse of power.
9. 66-67; in ancient Athens, 16;
and theory, 18. 19. 67; responsi-
bility of representatives, 37 57i
not scientific, 51, 56-57, 6s; not
in control of "the system: 92;
utopia of rationalization, 93-94
Positivism, 37, 53
Power: evil of, 31, 93, roo; of rea-
son. 37-38. 48; dialectic of, 67,
94; being powerful, 69, 104, ru;
of calculation, uS
.. .
Practice: and theory, xxxu, XXXIV
17, 19, 2.ft J6, s6. 66; and science.
"' .-
. - ( .,
42i professional training. uo; as
transcendental foundation,
154
Praise, 16
Preaching. us
Prejudices: questioning, xviii, xxix,
31. 71; in the Enlightenment.
4Si technological dream and
emancipatory utopia. 79-So;
and instinctive senses, u8-u9
Printing, us
Privacy, u, 109, no
Profession, 19, 26, 1o5-1o6, 107,
120
Progress. 25-28 passim
Prohairtsis, 8, 34 57 Stt aisD
Choice
Promise, 1-4
Prose. 125. 130-IJ2, IJ8 141-142
Protagoras, 73
Protestant Refonnarion. 86. 99,
125
Prorrepric. xxii-xxiii. JCXVi, 16
Psychoanalysis, 27 107
Public opinion, -45
Purpose, freedom from, 19. 63. 68
Pythagoras, 50-SI 7' UJ
Q!lesrion, u
Rationality.
-Economic (Rationalit41), 48, 93
98, U.f, U9
-Means/end, 40, 59
-Practical ( Vmriinftigwt, Pbrrr
Nsis): communal foundation of
ethics, xiii, xxxiii, 40, s8-59; and
finitude, xiii, 48; and taste, xiii;
in Kant, 24, 87; basic henneneu-
ric virtue, so, ISJi and theory. 57
6o

,
I

Rationalization: of our existence
is impossible, vii; removes soli-
darity and freedom, xxxiv, 99,
107, u7; not an end in itself,
36; effect on research, 62-63; as
totalitarianism, 92, 93
Rational obligation
Sach%wang), XXXV, 42-.u, 46-47,
107-108
Reading, 123, 125
Reality, 30, no
Reason: incarnate in existence,
vii; defined, xxxiii, 46, 119; and
logos, 4i and faith, 23, 76, 8s;
practical, 24, so, 87; social, 37-
49, 83; divided into pure theory
and practical rationality, 57-58
Recognition, 10
Reconciliation, 14
Reference, 13
Reformation, 86, 99, ns
Regulatory feedback, 8o-81
Reinhardt, Karl, 142
Relativism, xxvii, 154
Religion: dialogue between faiths,
u, 89; as human interaction,
14-15, 88, 97i enlightenment
as critique of, 71; rational, 87;
solitude of prayer, 104. also
Christianity; God
Rembrandt, 103
Renaissance, 75
Repetition compulsion, 107
Replaceability, 107
Reproduction, 2-3, n
Research: accidental discoveries,
xxxi, 64; funding, a6; need
for, 12, 39; history of concept,
23, 130; pure and applied, a6,
63; in anthropology, Jli and
rhetoric, 45, IJOi and experts,
62; freedom from purpose, 6S-
69i easily misunderstood, 7o;
conflict with ethics, 78; and
writing, 140. also Science
Responsibility: of researchers,
4
6;
political, of the individual, S7-
s8,82-8J,I08- Io9, 122jfoun-
dation of ethics, 79i for social
compulsions, 109; professional,
IIJ
Rhetoric: used by Gadamer, xvi-
xvii; as communal world-view,
xxxvi, 52, 126, 128; Plato on, 43,
44, 124; of mass media, 44, 136;
aligned with politics and poetry,
S7i and Enlightenment, 73i
move from speaking to writing,
I2J-12Si addressing audience's
understanding, 129-131i aca-
demic, religious and political,
140
Rickert, Heinrich, 153
Ricoeur, Paul, xxviii
Rights, 87, 88, 97
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 141
Rilla, Walter and Paul, 141
Ritual, XXV
Romantics, x, 25, 89, 96
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1, 24, 28,
6o, 102, In
Rules, 59, 121, 135
Saint-Simon, Comte de, 94
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph von, 139
Schiller, johann Christoph Fried-
rich von, 87, 92-9J, 1o6, 121
Schleiermacher, Friedrich,
54
Schlick, Morin,
53
Jlbllruin
Schobu1,IJO,l3S-IJ61 t38,142
Schopenhauer, Arthur, :, as, 139
Science: limits of, viii, xxxvi, 29,
4
8,
7
8, 81, 133; as blind domi-
nation of nature, viii, P 43,
n
7
; quest for good, beauty,
truth, x, 41, 68; history of, xxiii,
37
, 73; Gadamer on, xxiii; and

theory, XXVt-xxvu, 12, 35; sci-
ences as cultural anomalies, 13;
anonymous and vast, 23; mean-
ing 'knowledge,' 24; past and
future, 24; experience and rea-
son, 39 so-s2, 72, u6; reveals
our finitude and prejudices, 39;
revered by all, 43, 61; in society,
46, 62, 75, 117, uS; with con-
tentful presuppositions, 59-60;
patient objects of natural sci-
ence, 6s-66; scholar, researcher
and scientist, 130; dry precision,
134; writing in, 138-140. Set a/s()
Human sciences; Research
Seeing, 11
Self-alienation, 106, 109, 113
Self-confidence,98
Self-consciousness, 27, 28-29, 35,
n-78
Self-evidence, 45
Self-presentation, xiii, 14
Self-regulation, 8o-8r
Senses, uo
Stnsus communis, xxxvi, 48, uS. Stt
also Communality/Community
Separatism, 99
Sextus Empiricus, s:a
Sharing,6,9
Slavery, universal, u7
Society: history of, -41, -42, 7<4 117;
characterizations of, 59, Jo:a;
....... /
............. ______ ( -- -- /
a
convention and goal setting, 59i
requirements of, 69, 105, u1;
individual and, ')6, 107, 109;
true ground of all knowledge.
1S1-IS3"I9
Sociology, 45, 53
Socrates, xii, xvii, 1, 8, 17-18, 43, 57
Solidarity: communal basis of,
xxxiii, rs, 109, III; individual's
sdf-fiillillrnent required, xxxv,
113; importance of, 93, 94;
between politial opponents, 95
Solitude, 102-104. rn
Sophists, 43, 73, 94
Soul, Ill
Speaking, 44, 51
Specialization, xxxv, xxxvi, 44t 113,
us, u6- n7
Speculation, 21
Spengler, Oswald, 17
Spinoza, Benedict de, 85
Spirit, IO, 25, 27, 5<4. I 54
Sute, 6:a, 88, 9-4-95, 99, to6, tn
Sternberger, Dolf, 142
Style, 114, r:as, 131, tJ8, 139
Suffering, no
Superfluity, ix, 3-4, 105
Symbolization, 10, 133
Symmachus, 49
Symptoms, rot
System, the: soulless tyranny of.
xniv, 99 to6, 121; individual
under, 92, 95, , u7; and
tolerance,
Taste, xii, uo
Taylor, Charles, xvi
Technocracy, <47 57
Technological dream, vili,JOOciv,
79-80, 83

----
Technology: universality of, vii,
Understanding, xxviii, ss,
114
_
12
s,
79
,
117
; application of research,
129, IJI
xxxiv,
2
6,
7
6-77, 127; history of,
Universal, identification with the:
27
,
32
_
33
,
7
6-77; social impact
definition of reason, xxxiii,
3
a,
of, 81, 99, 117, 119
46; through fulfilling work,
Tdevision, 91, 108
xxxv, no, 113; lack of, 46, 106,
Temporal distance, XXX
107
Universals, 153
Terror, 93
Textbooks, 130
Unreason, 38
Thales of Miletus, 70
Utilitarianism, 26
"That," the, s8, 6o, ISJ Stt also
Utopia, viii, 28, 38, 79-80, 93-94,
Facticity
109

Theology, xi, 35, 73, 76, 81, 85, 89 .
Sua/so God
"alueS,97tS3-S4,I04,153
Thtoria, xxiv-xxv, xxvi, 31
"erse, 125
Theory: resisting the merely
"ienna, 84, 85 .
useful, x; in Analytic philoso-

"ienna Circle, 53
phy, xvi; protreptic, xxiii, 16;
"oice, u6
and practice, xxv, xxxii, xxxiv, 17,
'
66; fundamental joy of, xxvii,
20, J2, 35 n; distance from
Wagner, Richard, 25
self and openness to the other, War, 37
xax,xxx-xxxi,Js,6o,67-68;in


&OCiety, 19, 26, 41, no; in the Will, 25-26
Enlightenment, 24; prioritized Wisdom,104
by Aristotle, 34i and fact, 53 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xvi
Third estate, 74
Wonder, 21-22

Thucydides, 52 Words: in religion, xi, 3, 14; and

Tolerance, xxxiv, 84- 97 passim communication, s. 7 to; ques-
Totalitarianism, 92, 93 tion and answer, s. n; poetical,

Tradition, xxviii, u, 15, 22, 91
13, IJ7i tell a whole story, 22
Transcendental reSection, 154
Work: brings freedom and soli-
Translation, 13
darity, xxxv, 112; alienation from,
Transubstantiation, as
27, 1os, 109; asceticism of, 66,
Trinity, 90
tos, n8; modern rationalization
Trust, 57, 6s, 98
of, 107, u4, u7
Truth, vii, x-xi, xii, xxiv, xxvii,
World: scientific idea of, viii, 23,

So, 81, 127; administration of,
XXVUI, lJ, SS
I viii, 94, 95; finding self at home
18.tl lndex
c

I
I
in (or not), 14, 98, 105, 113, u8;
in poetry, 14
World War 1, xx, 27
World War 11,28
Writing: Gadamer's, xvii, 140-
14:li style, xxxvii, 135, 136; and
tradition, n, 51; distance from
/ntltx/JIIJ
reader, l:lJ, 115, 131; scientific,
IJ8-IJ9
Wroclaw, Poland, xx
Youth, 46, 91, 96, ro8, 112
Youth movement, 2, :&7